OpenAI fits teams that want one vendor for chat, coding, and image or video generation rather than assembling separate tools from different providers. Codex, its coding agent, already serves more than 2 million weekly users, and the new ChatGPT Work tool extends that bundle into everyday office tasks like drafting documents and spreadsheets for enterprise teams.
OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT and the OpenAI API, run by roughly 8,800 employees across San Francisco, New York, London, and Dublin. Its product line spans the Codex coding agent, Sora video generator, and the new Sol, Terra, and Luna reasoning models, with Microsoft as its exclusive Azure infrastructure partner.
Founded: 2015 · HQ: San Francisco, California, USA · Team: 8,800+ · CEO: Sam Altman · Funding: $180+ billion total raised (13 rounds, 72 investors) · Valuation: $852 billion (March 2026)
About OpenAI
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 in San Francisco as a non-profit artificial intelligence research organization. Its original founding team included Sam Altman (now CEO), Elon Musk (who departed the board in 2018), Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, and Andrej Karpathy. The stated mission from the beginning was to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, a goal that has remained the organizing principle of the company even as its organizational structure evolved substantially over the following decade. In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from a pure non-profit to a capped for-profit structure to attract the capital needed for large-scale model training. In 2025, OpenAI restructured into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) to simplify its capital structure while retaining a public benefit obligation. This restructuring cleared the path for a potential IPO, which the Wall Street Journal reported in January 2026 is being targeted for Q4 2026. OpenAI's primary consumer product is ChatGPT, which surpassed 900 million weekly active users in early 2026. ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month and provides access to GPT-5.5 Instant and o3 models. ChatGPT Enterprise is the business tier with SAML SSO, custom data privacy controls, and dedicated capacity. In July 2026, OpenAI added ChatGPT Work, a workplace companion for enterprise teams on desktop, web, and mobile that drafts documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The company also offers an OpenAI API and the OpenAI Realtime API for voice and audio applications. GPT-5.5 Instant remains the default model for everyday ChatGPT responses, having replaced GPT-5.3 Instant in May 2026. In July 2026, OpenAI publicly launched the GPT-5.6 family, Sol, Terra, and Luna, after a government-coordinated preview that began in late June 2026; Sol is available to eligible paid ChatGPT plans as a reasoning option rather than the default, and OpenAI calls it its strongest model yet for cybersecurity work, citing a 54% token-efficiency gain on coding tasks. The o-series reasoning models, including o3, handle complex multi-step problems. Sora, OpenAI's text-to-video model, launched publicly in late 2024. Codex serves over 2 million weekly users and is available in enterprise on-premises environments via a Dell partnership. In May 2026, OpenAI launched the OpenAI Deployment Company (DeployCo), a new subsidiary valued at $10 billion pre-money with $4 billion in initial investment from TPG, Bain Capital, SoftBank, Warburg Pincus, and others. DeployCo embeds Forward Deployed Engineers directly into enterprise customers. OpenAI simultaneously acquired Tomoro, an applied AI consulting firm, bringing approximately 150 engineers to the subsidiary at launch. In March 2026, OpenAI closed its largest-ever funding round: $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, with Amazon contributing $50 billion, and Nvidia and SoftBank contributing $30 billion each. This is the largest private company funding round in history. Total capital raised across 13 rounds now exceeds $180 billion. OpenAI generates approximately $2 billion in monthly revenue, with annualized revenue estimated at $25 billion as of early 2026. OpenAI's largest strategic investor is Microsoft, which has committed $13 billion in total capital and made Azure the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's infrastructure. This arrangement gives Microsoft integration rights to embed OpenAI models across Office 365, Bing, GitHub Copilot, and Azure OpenAI Service. OpenAI employs approximately 8,800 people across its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in New York, London, and Dublin. Compliance certifications include SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR compliance for EU operations, and HIPAA eligibility for healthcare use cases. The company's trust and compliance documentation is available at trust.openai.com. OpenAI faces regulatory scrutiny in the EU and UK over data privacy practices and market dominance concerns related to its Microsoft partnership. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority and several EU member states have raised questions about GDPR compliance in training data collection. OpenAI's commercial strategy centers on expanding ChatGPT's user base, deepening API adoption, developing agentic products, and scaling enterprise deployment through DeployCo.
Mission
To develop artificial general intelligence that is safe and beneficial, ensuring that AI benefits humanity broadly and aligns with human values.
Products
- ChatGPT
- OpenAI API
- Codex
- Sora
- OpenAI Deployment Company (DeployCo)
- GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna)
- ChatGPT Work
OpenAI Models on HokAI
Compliance
SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, FedRAMP
Links
Website · GitHub · Twitter · LinkedIn · Blog · Docs
Frequently Asked Questions
How was OpenAI funded, and how much is it worth?
OpenAI has raised more than $180 billion across 13 rounds since its 2015 founding, most recently a record close in March 2026 backed by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Microsoft remains the largest strategic investor, having committed $13 billion in total capital in exchange for exclusive rights to run OpenAI's models on Azure.
What products does OpenAI make in 2026, and what do they cost?
OpenAI's core consumer product is ChatGPT, sold as ChatGPT Plus for $20 a month with GPT-5.5 Instant for everyday chat plus reasoning access to o3 and, on eligible plans, the newer Sol model; ChatGPT Enterprise adds SAML SSO, custom data controls, and dedicated capacity for larger organizations. Developers use the OpenAI API and Realtime API for programmatic access to the same models, the Codex coding agent works inside ChatGPT and through the API, and Sora, available to Plus and Pro subscribers, turns text prompts into video.
Is OpenAI compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR?
OpenAI holds SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA eligibility, with GDPR compliance documentation for EU operations published at trust.openai.com. Regulators in the UK and EU are still examining whether its training data practices satisfy GDPR, a review that also touches the market power created by the Microsoft partnership.
How does OpenAI compare to Anthropic in 2026?
OpenAI and Anthropic are the two most valuable AI labs, with OpenAI now fielding both its everyday ChatGPT model and the newer Sol, Terra, and Luna family for reasoning and coding. On the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, OpenAI's Sol scored a few points above Anthropic's Fable 5 while using under half the output tokens and costing roughly a third less, according to a July 2026 TechCrunch report. Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI researchers, still commands a higher valuation than OpenAI following its own May 2026 funding round.
How do you get started with OpenAI's products?
Individuals can sign up for ChatGPT Plus for self-serve access to OpenAI's current models and o3, while developers build against the OpenAI API and Realtime API using the documentation at platform.openai.com. Organizations evaluating ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Work, or the DeployCo Forward Deployed Engineer program typically work directly with OpenAI's sales and deployment teams to scope requirements first.
Top Alternatives
- Anthropic: Pick OpenAI for the wider consumer and developer product lineup across chat, coding, and video; pick Anthropic if you want the currently higher-valued lab, now worth more than OpenAI after its May 2026 round.
- Google DeepMind: Pick OpenAI for its consumer-facing ChatGPT ecosystem and Microsoft Azure distribution; pick Google DeepMind for Alphabet's research bench of 8,000+ scientists behind Gemini, AlphaFold, and Gemma.
- xAI: Pick OpenAI for standalone AI-lab focus and enterprise deployment through DeployCo; pick xAI, now merged into SpaceX as Nasdaq-listed SPCX, for direct X platform integration and Grok.
- Mistral AI: Pick OpenAI for closed frontier models and the largest enterprise ecosystem; pick Mistral AI for open-weight models you can self-host at a fraction of OpenAI's total funding.