OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees during an all-hands meeting on Wednesday that the artificial intelligence lab “will be a public company in 2027,” but that it could make its public market debut sooner if “our business continues to inflect.”
“The IPO is not a finish line, it is a milestone, another fundraise,” Friar told employees, according to two sources familiar with her comments who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “We raised $122 billion in March, and that gives us flexibility.”
OpenAI confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but it has not publicly disclosed when it plans to debut. The company’s chief rival, Anthropic, has also confidentially filed its prospectus with regulators, and it’s been holding early meetings to test the waters with potential investors, as CNBC previously reported.
Friar told employees on Wednesday not to worry if Anthropic makes its debut ahead of OpenAI.
“As you know we are confidentially under file, and Anthropic is also under file. There is a chance they pull the cover off that confidential file in the coming weeks and become public in September. That’s OK, we are running our own race,” Friar said, according to the people.
OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation ahead of its IPO, and investors are eager to get a more detailed look into the company’s finances.
During the all-hands meeting on Wednesday, Friar showed employees a series of slides that said OpenAI’s revenue run rate is up 35% quarter to date, its enterprise revenue run rate is up 50% quarter to date and its AI coding and work product has hit 20 million weekly active users.
OpenAI told investors it generated $6.7 billion in revenue for the second quarter, up 18% from the first quarter, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday. The company’s annualized revenue run rate recently topped $40 billion, as CNBC previously reported.
Anthropic, meanwhile, told investors over the weekend that its annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July, a sevenfold increase from a year ago. The company also shared a preliminary revenue figure of $11.5 billion for the second quarter, as CNBC previously reported.
Friar’s comments at the all-hands meeting come after a wave of executive turnover at OpenAI, which has caused some of the company’s financial backers to fret about potential chaos within its upper ranks.
Last week, OpenAI’s revenue chief Denise Dresser left her role after just eight months at the company. Her departure came two days after Brad Lightcap, another longtime executive, said he was ending an eight-year stint at the ChatGPT creator to “start something new.” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s product business chief, stepped down from her role in July to focus on recovery from chronic illness.
Now, remaining executives, including Friar, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, are tasked with projecting stability at a time when investors are already growing concerned about competition, increased adoption of lower-cost open-weight models, and SpaceX’s volatile stock price in its first two months on the market.
Brockman brushed off concerns about the executive departures during an interview with CNBC on Monday, when he stated that he doesn’t think the turnover is “actually that atypical.”
“I actually think that the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that we are so much in the spotlight, so every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise,” Brockman said.
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