Recently, a major announcement about the AI giant OpenAI has sparked widespread attention in the tech industry. At an internal all-hands meeting, OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer, Sara Ferial, clarified the company's IPO timeline to employees and revealed the latest financial and business key data.

IPO Is Just a New Funding Start, Timeline Locked for 2027

At the all-hands meeting, Sara Ferial informed employees that the company will complete its IPO by 2027 at the latest. If the business continues to perform strongly, it may even go public earlier. She emphasized to employees that the IPO is not the end but a milestone in the development process, essentially just another form of funding channel. The previous $122 billion (approximately 824.34 billion yuan) fundraising in March has already provided the company with ample strategic space.

According to insiders, OpenAI actually submitted its IPO prospectus secretly to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this June. Its core competitor Anthropic also adopted a similar secret filing strategy and may officially go public in September this year. In response, Ferial said there was no need to worry about competitors' pace, as the OpenAI team would steadily advance its own IPO plan.

Strong Financials and User Base Support Sky-High Valuation

At this critical stage of preparing for the IPO, facing scrutiny of its $852 billion (approximately 5.76 trillion yuan) valuation, OpenAI publicly released a set of strong financial and growth data.

Data shows that OpenAI's overall annualized revenue grew by 35% in this quarter, with enterprise-level business revenue increasing by 50% significantly. Additionally, the weekly active users of its AI coding and office products have exceeded 20 million. According to details disclosed by foreign media, OpenAI's revenue in the second quarter reached $6.7 billion (approximately 45.27 billion yuan), an 18% increase from the first quarter. Recently, its overall annualized revenue has surpassed $40 billion (approximately 270.28 billion yuan). Meanwhile, the annualized revenue of its main competitor Anthropic has also reached $65 billion (approximately 439.2 billion yuan), indicating that the entire generative AI sector is currently in a phase of rapid commercialization.

Executive Changes Draw Attention, Management Publicly Responds to Stabilize Morale

Notably, before disclosing its IPO plan, OpenAI experienced a wave of executive changes, including several key members such as the revenue head Denisse Drees, senior executive Brad Lightcap, and product business head Fergie Simo, who left or resigned one after another, causing concerns about the company's top management turmoil.

In response to market concerns, OpenAI President Greg Brockman publicly downplayed the impact of these changes. He believed that the outside world had overemphasized the personnel turnover at OpenAI, and each small adjustment would be magnified. In fact, such executive turnover is not that unusual for other industry peers away from the spotlight. As the remaining core executive team continues to send stable signals to the market, the industry giant is steadily moving toward the public capital market at full speed.