HargaRumah: OpenAI Plans For IPO

Kamis, 30 Oktober 2025

OpenAI Plans For IPO

Plus: Look out for fake expense receipts.

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Welcome back to The Prompt,

ChatGPT maker OpenAI is setting its eyes on an IPO as soon as late 2026, according to a Reuters report. The IPO could double the AI behemoth's valuation to $1 trillion and pave the way for the company to raise more capital to fund its massive trillion-dollar AI infrastructure buildout. Despite projections of $20 billion of annualized revenue by the end of the year, OpenAI's losses are steeply climbing as well, thanks to costly GPUs and data centers as well as pricey AI talent. "I think it's fair to say that it's the most likely path for us given the capital needs that we'll have," CEO Sam Altman said during a livestream on Tuesday.

This issue of The Prompt comes to you from San Francisco, where I've been running (and Uber-ing) around reporting and collecting tips! I'd also love to hear from you if you have any tips on stories I should cover. You can reach me at rshrivastava@forbes.com.

Now let's get into the headlines.

Rashi Shrivastava Reporter

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BIG PLAYS

The restructuring was announced Monday morning. (Photo by Didem Mente/Anadolu via Getty Images) Anadolu via Getty Images

OpenAI's IPO talk comes after a major announcement: It's now a public benefit corporation. After months of a grueling and complicated restructuring process, OpenAI said Tuesday that its nonprofit arm, now called the OpenAI Foundation, now holds a 26% stake worth $130 billion in the for-profit entity, called OpenAI Group PBC. Early backer Microsoft holds a 27% stake in the PBC, worth $135 billion. (The AI juggernaut also announced new details of its partnership with Microsoft, including a commitment to purchase $250 billion worth of compute services from Azure.) OpenAI's current and former employees will receive 26% equity in the PBC. The OpenAI Foundation plans to invest $25 billion into philanthropic projects like building datasets that could help develop cures for diseases and developing technology to minimize risks posed by AI.

It's been a long road for OpenAI to get here. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 but ever since its blockbuster product ChatGPT took off, it's been trying to change its structure so that it's no longer a fast growing startup constrained by its nonprofit arm—a move that will help it raise more funding and remove caps on returns for investors. But OpenAI's restructuring efforts have faced stiff opposition from its biggest rivals (namely, Elon Musk, who cofounded the nonprofit), civic leaders and ex-employees. Now that it's finalized, the restructure unlocks $30 billion in additional funding from Softbank that was contingent on its completion.

Altman also announced that OpenAI plans to build an AI research intern by September 2026. This software would be able to automatically complete tasks like analyze datasets and test models.

ETHICS + LAW

X owner and billionaire announced the launch of version 0.1 of his Wikipedia alternative, Grokipedia. Anadolu via Getty Images

Elon Musk's latest target: Wikipedia. The billionaire announced the first version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia built entirely using AI-generated articles. It is designed to be an alternative to Wikipedia, which Musk has claimed is biased and "woke." Musk claims Grokipedia contains over 885,000 articles that are created and fact-checked by xAI's chatbot Grok. But some of these articles are near-identical copies of Wikipedia entries, which rely on human crowdsourcing. In response, Wikimedia Foundation said: "Wikipedia's knowledge is – and always will be – human…This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist."

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Harvey cofounder Winston Weinberg was honored on the 2024 Under 30 Enterprise Technology list. Harvey

Legal AI startup Harvey has closed a $150 million round at a $8 billion valuation, my colleague Iain Martin and I reported for Forbes.

Synthesia, which uses AI to make training and marketing videos for enterprises, has raised $200 million at a $4 billion valuation, Anna Tong, Iain and I reported.

Palo Alto-based startup Genspark is in talks to raise more than $200 million in funding, doubling its valuation to more than $1 billion, sources told Forbes. After launching an AI search product, it has pivoted to offering a broad range of AI tools for different office tasks.

Fireworks AI, which provides software to developers to build and run AI models, has raised $250 million in Series C funding at a $4 billion valuation, the company told Forbes. It has also passed $280 million in annualized revenue.

Mercor, a young startup that is using AI to recruit humans to train AI models, has raised $350 million in Series C funding at a $10 billion valuation, the company announced.

ConductorOne cofounders Alex Bovee (left) and Paul Querna (right) ConductorOne

DEEP DIVE

AI Employees Are Coming. This Startup Wants To Keep Them Secure.

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The promise of AI agents is that they'll act like human employees, deployed autonomously on tasks like navigating the web, sending emails and Slacks and working in Google Docs. But that also means they'll need access to tons of applications, just like other staffers — creating additional work for IT teams managing that access, and increasing how vulnerable an organization is to identity-related hacks.

Startup ConductorOne aims to eliminate that manual toil through a singular dashboard to help companies manage access for employees and agents alike, while flagging related security risks.

"Identity is the way that companies are breached today and it's getting ten, a hundred times worse with the number of non-human and AI identities that are coming online," said Alex Bovee, CEO and cofounder of ConductorOne.

ConductorOne's software can plug into existing applications, tracking who accesses what across the organization and automating requests for new access. That especially comes in handy during onboarding processes when IT teams typically would have to approve and set up access to every single application for each employee. Bovee said publicly traded cloud security company Zscaler was able to use ConductorOne to reduce its engineers' onboarding process from 20 days to 20 minutes.

Now, ConductorOne has closed a $79 million Series B round led by Greycroft with participation from strategic investor CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and prior investors Accel and Felicis Ventures. The funding round values the company at $350 million, according to sources familiar with the deal. The startup told Forbes it tripled its revenue last year as it onboarded clients like ZScaler and fintech startup Brex.

Read the full story on Forbes.

MODEL BEHAVIOR

Employees are increasingly trying to expense AI-generated receipts, the Financial Times reported. Thanks to an influx of AI video and image generation tools that can create convincing deepfakes (including wrinkled paper and signatures), counterfeit receipts have become much easier and cheaper to produce, making up some 14% of fraudulent documents, according to data from software company AppZen.

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