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OpenAI has pledged up to $1.5bn to a new joint venture with private equity firms, part of its effort to beat rival Anthropic and corner the increasingly lucrative market of selling AI tools to businesses.
The start-up will put an initial $500mn of its equity into the joint venture, which will be valued at $10bn as part of a funding round expected to close in early May, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
OpenAI has the option to add a further $1bn at a later date, they said. Investors including TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield and Goanna Capital will invest another $4bn, they added.
The new venture, internally named ‘DeployCo’ has started to hire its own staff alongside secondees from OpenAI and will charge its clients — primarily the private equity firms’ portfolio companies — to embed AI into their businesses.
DeployCo is designed to accelerate the adoption of OpenAI’s tools in the workplace and forms a key part of the company’s assault on the enterprise market. OpenAI is also working with consultancies including McKinsey & Company and Accenture on that effort.
The venture’s private equity backers will invest for five years, and OpenAI had guaranteed them an annual 17.5 per cent return. “That is a floor . . . but we expect it to be much higher,” said a person with knowledge of the plans.
That is roughly the minimum return a PE fund might target, although the guarantee reduces the risk the investors are taking on in the transaction. OpenAI in return will get the benefit of “patient capital, locked up for five years,” according to the person.
The OpenAI equity held by the joint venture could be used to strike deals to acquire technology and intellectual property in the future.
The new company “generates revenue by being the best in the world at AI deployment, at rewiring businesses. If we’re very early in this cycle [of AI adoption], then that’s a very valuable asset,” they said.
It will be a key part of the group’s strategy to gain the upper hand on rival Anthropic, whose annualised revenue has more than trebled this year on the strength of its enterprise products such as Claude Code.
Anthropic is also in talks with PE firms including Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman about partnering on a joint venture to create a consultancy to help deploy novel AI technologies inside a broad stable of businesses, according to people briefed on the matter.
OpenAI executives have described a “capability overhang” in AI, meaning today’s models are capable of far more than they are being used for. Chief revenue officer Denise Dresser in a note to sales staff this month said the biggest “bottleneck” to companies using AI is not the technology but “whether companies can deploy it”.
DeployCo, a Delaware-listed LLC, will be majority owned by OpenAI and is currently managed by Brad Lightcap, until recently the group’s chief operating officer. OpenAI will have super-voting shares, according to a person with knowledge of the structure.
Lightcap has overseen the hiring of dozens of ‘forward deployed engineers’, software developers who are embedded within companies to help them use technology. OpenAI will also send staff on secondment to the new company, said the person with knowledge of the plans.
That model has been successful for US software group Palantir, which pioneered the use of forward-deployed engineers.
A number of venture firms have also sought to capture the upside from businesses’ AI adoption. General Catalyst, Thrive Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as Jeff Bezos’ AI start-up Project Prometheus, have each bought up companies and infused them with the technology, or are planning to do so.
OpenAI, TPG, Bain, Advent, Brookfield and Goanna declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Ryan McMorrow and Antoine Gara
