2. OpenAI
Founders: Sam Altman (CEO), Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Elon MuskLaunched: 2015Headquarters: San FranciscoFunding: $63.9 billion (PitchBook)Valuation: $300 billionKey Technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, generative AI, machine learningIndustry: Enterprise technologyPrevious appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 2 (No. 1 in 2024)
OpenAI's ChatGPT continues to grow fast, whether the metric is users, revenue, valuation or intelligence.
In a recent Ted Talk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the rate of user growth had doubled in just a few weeks, and that was building off an existing user count he estimated at 500 million people.
The company's recent $40 billion fundraising round, valuing it at a $300 billion, was the most ever raised by a private tech company.
The generative AI company has come a long way from the breakout moment of ChatGPT's debut in November 2022. At the time of the historic April fundraising announcement, Altman noted in an X post that the company had added one million users in the five days after the chatbot's 2022 launch. Less than three years later, it is adding as many as one million users per hour.
"People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it," OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said in a February interview with CNBC. "There's an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable," he added.
The growth has been rewarded with increased investor bets on OpenAI's revenue and profit potential, with recent reports indicating revenue may reach $13 billion this year, and reach over $100 billion by 2029. The company, which is still losing money according to 2024 financials, has put the revenue goal for this year closer to $11 billion, with CFO Sarah Friar telling CNBC in February that was within "the realm of possibility."
That would still be close to three times last year's revenue level. On Monday, the company announced that it had hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, a figure including sales from consumer products, ChatGPT business products and its application programming interface, or API.
As a product, ChatGPT continues to push out new R&D breakthroughs, each one promising to disrupt multiple sectors of the economy and types of work. ChatGPT Search was unveiled in late 2024, and early this year, OpenAI launched Operator, an "agentic" AI assistant that can plan vacations, make dinner reservations, and order groceries, among other tasks.
While its consumer-facing product growth gets the most attention, its enterprise service just reached the three-million user mark.
The company is also beginning to put more of its cash to work by way of acquisitions, buying coding startup Windsurf, which was its biggest acquisition ever — until it bought iPhone designer Jony Ive's device startup for $6.4 billion in May.
The biggest deal of all is Stargate, the $500 billion AI investment consortium that also includes OpenAI investor Softbank, as well as Oracle, and was first announced with President Trump in January. That was recently expanded on a global basis, with OpenAI and Oracle, alongside Nvidia and Cisco, announcing during Trump's trip to the Middle East that a Stargate project will be based in the United Arab Emirates.
The past year has not been without challenges, most notable among them the emergence of China's DeepSeek, which continues to innovate with its large language models. While OpenAI faces healthy competition within the U.S. AI sector, from fellow Disruptor 50 company Anthropic, to Meta's open-source models and Google Gemini, DeepSeek, whose models are supposedly far less expensive and resource intensive, poses existential questions about the massive bets being placed on AI by U.S. firms, as well as questions about U.S. supremacy in the global AI race.
OpenAI also faces a battle for control of the company and questions about its conversion from a nonprofit to for-profit entity, this time related to a hostile takeover bid from Elon Musk, which was quickly rejected by the board. In May, facing internal and external pressure, OpenAI announced that its nonprofit would retain control of the company even as it restructures into a public benefit corporation.
Altman, who said in a blog post about the structural changes that trillions of dollars will be needed to serve its mission, dismissed the threat Musk poses to the future of the company. "You all are obsessed with Elon, that's your job — like, more power to you. But we are here to think about our mission and figure out how to enable that. And that mission has not changed," Altman wrote.
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