OpenAI's Business Model Pillars
Just yesterday, at a conference in Tokyo, OpenAI and SoftBank officialized their partnership.
The partnership will inject $40 billion through AI collaborations for OpenAI, making the company worth $340 billion!
OpenAI’s losses in 2024 mounted to over $5 billion. The company is burning an impressive amount of cash, however it is also growing exponentially, thus representing one of the most impressive growth stories of the last 30-50 years.
Below are some remarkable KPIs that help you understand its unit economics (numbers reported by The Information).
In 2024, the company reached over 15 million paid subscribers, a 167% increase on 2023, and ChatGPT premium alne reached over $4 billion in revenue.
On the other end, its API usage increased by 7x in 2024, generating over $3 billion in revenue.
The “DeepSeek Moment” only works like an accelerator, so OpenAI can move even faster.
And as I explained yesterday, the company has just come out with the first potential multi-step agent on the market!
And Sam Altman also confirmed he’s looking into AI-specific hardware.
This is just the further evolution of a broader AI Paradigm Shift, which is happening as we speak, with AI underpinning all of it.
But what makes up OpenAI’s Business Model?
I explained its foundation a couple of years back.
Yet, we can now look at the core of OpenAI’s business model based on the fresh numbers we got.
Thus, the OpenAI’s business model moves around three core parts.
