$110 billion in a single round. OpenAI with a cannonball into the funding pool today.
For reference, that $110B is more than all US VC-backed companies raised in 2015 or 2016 or 2017.
It's more than half of all funding raised by US VC-backed companies in 8 of the last 11 years.
But is it really venture capital?
3 investors put in $30B each to this latest OAI bonanza - Amazon, NVIDIA, and Softbank. Softbank is its own whole thing, but Amazon and NVIDIA aren't among your typical Tier 1 VCs.
Put another way, this capital was not siphoned off from regular startups in ordered to be invested into OpenAI. They and a few others have effectively created net new capital markets for themselves. The mega VC.
The late-stage-growth-private-but-semi-public-monolith-rounds.
Sure, they aren't public (yet). But this is not the venture capital our forefathers practiced.
Don't get distracted by the shiny numbers, founder friends 🙏
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