Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest funded OpenAI’s funding round, adding $250M

ARK Investment Management is investing at least $250M in OpenAI’s latest funding round, according to people familiar with the round, Business Insider reported on Wednesday.

This would be the fund’s second investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

This funding is also one of the largest in startup history, bringing the funding round to $6.6B. Thrive Capital led the round. Other rumored participants are Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY) and Altimeter Capital.

The fund management company founded by Cathie Wood said it bought a stake in OpenAI in April. Ark has also previously invested in Anthropic, xAI, SpaceX, FigureAI, and Databricks.

The new round values the ChatGPT developer at a $157B valuation.

“The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems,” OpenAI said in blog post today.