OpenAI's annualized revenue is rumored to have surpassed $40 billion! Strong growth momentum on the eve of a potential IPO
The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to people familiar with the matter, OpenAI's current annualized revenue has exceeded 40 billion US dollars, roughly double that of the end of 2025. This performance further strengthened the company's preparations for listing. According to people familiar with the matter, OpenAI's revenue growth has accelerated in recent months, partly due to the rapid development of its artificial intelligence (AI) programming software business. Revenue growth also reflects continued momentum in subscription sales and the nascent advertising business. Meanwhile, OpenAI's core consumer business continues to grow.
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, said that the company's annualized revenue in July increased by more than 20% month-on-month. Recently, demand for OpenAI in the field of AI agents has risen markedly. Typical products include the programming tool Codex and the general assistant ChatGPT Work. At the same time, OpenAI has lowered the prices of some models to respond more flexibly to the challenges of Anthropic and many competitors. On Thursday, OpenAI appointed its second new chief revenue officer in less than a year and hired a cybersecurity executive to help drive sales growth.
OpenAI is currently competing fiercely with Anthropic to win more enterprise customers. Both companies have secretly submitted listing documents, and Anthropic expects an IPO as soon as this fall, possibly earlier than OpenAI. Anthropic was once seen as a catcher, but with AI tools that can simplify complex tasks, including programming, the company continues to gain market attention. Anthropic said in May of this year that its annualized revenue has exceeded 47 billion US dollars, but the two companies may not calculate this indicator in the same way.
Repurchase $7 billion of employee holdings to prepare for a potential IPO
In addition to strong performance, recent news about OpenAI's repurchase of $7 billion of employee holdings also suggests that the company may be preparing for its initial public offering (IPO) ahead of schedule. People familiar with the matter said that in this takeover deal, OpenAI is buying back shares from current and former employees rather than seeking outside investors to participate as in the past — in the past, OpenAI invited investors, including Thrive Capital and SoftBank Group, to buy company shares held by employees. According to people familiar with the matter, the deal valued the startup at $852 billion, which is in line with its valuation during the most recent round of financing.
According to reports, preparations for this stock takeover deal began after OpenAI completed a record $122 billion financing round in March. The deal will help the company ease recent liquidity pressure, enable employees to sell some of their holdings and cash out some before the company is likely to launch a large-scale IPO.
The sale of secondary market shares has become part of OpenAI's pre-listing strategy. In October of last year, OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion stock tender transaction, when the company's valuation reached 500 billion US dollars. In addition, OpenAI also completed a $1.5 billion stock tender transaction in 2024.
The later a company goes public, the more likely it is for stock options and restricted shares held by employees to become tax and cash flow issues. Javier Avalos, CEO of private market data platform Caplight, said that OpenAI employees have fully owned and held shares for some time, and at this stage, the company will feel the pressure to provide mobility to employees. Company-led employee share sale offers are the main channel for employees to cash out their shares before the IPO. In addition to this, there are also employees who sell shares through separate secondary transactions.
However, employee stock sales can only relieve internal liquidity pressure and cannot solve the capital needs of cutting-edge model companies. The Information notes that for OpenAI and its competitor Anthropic, the IPO would allow them to raise tens of billions of dollars to train and run models. The two companies expect to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on computing services in the future.
Not all employees are willing to sell before listing. The Information mentioned that the final scale of Anthropic's employee stock sale earlier this year was lower than previously reported investor purchase intentions of $5 billion to $6 billion. One possible reason is that some employees decide that it is more cost-effective to wait for an IPO before selling. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have also been cracking down on unauthorized share sales in recent months, such as private transfers through special purpose carriers. For AI companies that are preparing to go public or continue to raise large sums of money, controlling the order of equity transactions itself is also part of what needs to be handled before entering the open market.
Listing may be postponed to 2027
Furthermore, according to reports, OpenAI has taken a sharp step back from its initial ambition of “going public as soon as possible this fall,” and currently clearly favors delaying the IPO schedule until 2027. Behind this delay is a head-on collision between CEO Sam Ultraman's insistence on the trillion-dollar valuation bottom line and the harsh reality of the market.
The sharp shock in the stock price of SpaceX (SPCX.US) after its listing constituted a direct psychological deterrent to OpenAI's IPO plans. Bankers providing IPO proposals for OpenAI clearly warned that recent sharp fluctuations in technology stocks and a sharp drop in stock prices after SpaceX's listing could seriously weaken retail investors' enthusiasm for OpenAI's issuance of shares. A source familiar with the matter revealed that OpenAI's advisors spoke bluntly with the company in the past week that retail investors may lack enthusiasm for its stock.
OpenAI's valuation dilemma is a core contradiction in delaying decision-making. In March 2026, OpenAI completed financing of 122 billion US dollars, and the post-investment valuation reached 852 billion US dollars. It is already the unlisted technology company with the highest valuation in the world. However, this achievement fell far short of Ultraman's psychological expectations. Ultraman has been urging a team of advisors, including bankers and lawyers, to try to push the company's IPO valuation to $1 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The consulting team proposed two solutions to Ultraman: one was to delay the IPO until 2027, wait for the market environment to improve, while bringing the company's financial performance closer to the trillion dollar valuation target; the other was to go public before the end of 2026, but accept a lower valuation. According to a person who has been in contact with Ultraman, when advisers proposed this option, Ultraman said any plan to cut the valuation below trillion dollars “won't work.”
At the same time, OpenAI's financial situation is also testing investors' patience. The company's net loss reached 38.5 billion US dollars last year, mainly due to huge expenses on computing power infrastructure construction, R&D investment, and corporate restructuring. According to The Information, in the first quarter of 2026, OpenAI burned 3.7 billion US dollars in cash, more than half of the $5.7 billion revenue for the same period. The company expects to spend $600 billion in computing and hardware by 2030.
According to people familiar with the matter, in recent months, some of OpenAI's big investors have privately expressed concern that the company is spending cash too fast compared to its growth, while others have hedged their bets on OpenAI by investing in Anthropic.
OpenAI's delay is not an exception. The analysis indicates that the IPOs of large model companies, which were originally scheduled to launch in the second half of 2026, may be postponed to the first half of 2027 due to declining market risk appetite and uncertainty in the liquidity environment. The change in the IPO schedule means that the company's high-profile listing plan will be significantly delayed from what the market previously anticipated this fall.
The most intuitive interpretation of the 2027 timeline is: OpenAI is capable of waiting. By delaying, the company can continue to expand usage, improve pricing, and seek a more stable business mix between consumer products, enterprise tools, and infrastructure partners before entering the open market subject to quarterly discipline.