Who Owns OpenAI?

OpenAI's ambitious goals in AI research

OpenAI was founded in December 2015. It was a nonprofit company at first, aiming to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."

The absence of financial goals, such as creating value for shareholders, allowed OpenAI to pursue its world-changing goals without distractions.

The capped-profit structure remains in 2025. The company has updated its mission statement, now aimed at "ensuring that safe artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity." In the same breath, the company also says that it might never make a profit -- and it is "under no obligation to do so."

Who is the owner of OpenAI?

Early financial backers included venture capital giant Peter Thiel, Tesla (TSLA +1.80%) CEO Elon Musk, India-based technology consulting expert Infosys (INFY -0.73%), the startup incubator Y Combinator, the cloud-computing pioneers of Amazon (AMZN +1.05%) Web Services (AWS), LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Their first round of funding added up to $1 billion, and OpenAI never made it clear who contributed how much.

The structure changed in 2018 when the nonprofit created a capped-profit unit called OpenAI LP. The new division is allowed to generate a financial profit but with strict limits. The maximum return on the first round of investments was set at 100 times, with lower return caps expected for subsequent investors. Any bottom-line profit in excess of these targets will be reinvested in accelerating the research mission rather than lining the pockets of OpenAI investors.

After this shift, any mention of the bare-bones "OpenAI" name refers to the for-profit arm. The original group, known as OpenAI Nonprofit, still runs the show, setting targets and strategy with a 10-member board of directors as of March 2025. CEO Sam Altman holds one seat, while the other nine board members are categorized as independents. The for-profit entity doesn't have a separate board.

Importantly, most of the board members can't hold any financial interest in OpenAI and its operations. Employees and investors sign legal agreements to put OpenAI's research mission first, "even at the expense of some or all of their financial stake." And if the organization faces questions about where the interests of investors may conflict with the AI research mission, only independent board members without financial stakes can vote on what happens next.

Who are OpenAI's largest shareholders?

OpenAI, as a private company with a unique "capped-profit" structure, does not disclose detailed breakdowns of its ownership shares. However, some of its major investors are widely known, with a light sprinkling of investment details provided in OpenAI's official blog posts. The exact details of their financial involvement and ownership stakes are not public knowledge.

Individuals

1. Altman co-founded and co-funded OpenAI but has made it clear that he no longer holds any financial interest in the company.
2. Greg Brockman was the chief technical officer at digital payments expert Stripe as that company grew from four to 250 employees. He left Stripe to co-found OpenAI, participating in the initial $1 billion funding round. It's unclear whether he kept a stake or let it go.
3. Hoffman was also part of the first OpenAI funding round. The LinkedIn co-founder holds several board seats, including a Microsoft seat. Again, his financial ties to OpenAI in 2024 are not public knowledge.
4. Thiel is an experienced venture capitalist and co-founder of household-name technology companies. Like Brockman, Altman, and Hoffman, he took part in OpenAI's original funding. His current stake is not known, but investors of his caliber tend to let their winners run. In other words, if any of the AI expert's initial funding providers still hold on to their investment almost a decade later, it's probably Thiel.

Institutional investors

1. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and committed another $10 billion to the AI innovator in 2023. The partnership deepened along the way as Microsoft added OpenAI's tools to its Azure cloud-computing service, to its Bing search engine, and to its Edge browser. Microsoft is reportedly entitled to 49% of the profits generated by OpenAI's for-profit unit, but that agreement is not the same thing as a 49% ownership position. The details of Microsoft's OpenAI involvement are kept under wraps.
2. Amazon Web Services was among the original OpenAI funding sources. AWS was quick to set up virtual "gyms" in which OpenAI developers and clients could run their AI solutions through a gauntlet of test runs.
3. Infosys was also on board with the OpenAI journey from day one. Vishal Sikka, the company's CEO at the time, was inspired by Altman's ambition to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) to benefit humanity.
4. Big-name venture capital funds Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Thrive, K2 Global, and Andreessen Horowitz put their wallets together in April 2023, pouring a total of $300 million into OpenAI. The round was not a technology partnership but a simple financial investment with the purpose of pocketing large gains over time.

That's not the end of OpenAI's funding history. For example, the organization collected $6.6 billion from investors like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Thrive Capital in October 2024. This cash injection suggested a total market value of $157 billion, up from $27 billion only 18 months earlier.

FAQs