OpenAI DevDay
Ashley Capoot | CNBC
Almost every successful technology startup throughout history has had to confront the reality that it could be swallowed or overrun by a large incumbent company at any moment. For an entrepreneur it is part of everyday life.
But the company at the center of the current boom is a completely different beast.
Unlike industry giants of the past, OpenAI is privately owned. His financial information is mostly secret and his ability and willingness to spend other people’s money is unrivaled.
And as OpenAI has recently proven through a dizzying array of mammoth deals and product launches, the artificial intelligence lab is investing in everything from the minutiae of data center development to consumer applications, coding tools, and even devices. Its flagship chatbot ChatGPT has reached 800 million users weekly.
“If you’re an entrepreneur, you have to ask yourself, ‘Where’s the white space?'” said Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures who focuses on AI.
Not that Achadjian is staying out of the market.
In a deal announced Wednesday, Achadjian and Index invested $25 million in Quilter, which uses AI to develop software for printed circuit boards (PCBs). The company was founded in 2019 by former SpaceX engineer Sergiy Nesterenko.
Achadjian described quilters as “pretty niche” and “not based on one model.” She said it’s unlikely that OpenAI will compete in an area that companies like Cadence design And Table of contents have long developed technologies for chip design, adding that a circuit board is included in every consumer device, every light bulb, every car tire and virtually all electronic devices.
Still, “there is no predictability,” she said. Compared to previous cycles, “it’s more opaque and harder to predict which direction these guys are going to go.”
In less than three years, OpenAI has grown from an AI startup led by the man who used to run Y Combinator to a $500 billion behemoth, spearheading a White House-approved data center expansion plan and partnering with the world’s most valuable company. Nvidia.
The last few months have only gotten crazier.
CEO Sam Altman is everywhere, forging major infrastructure deals with Nvidia. Broadcom oracle And AMD. Last week his company launched its Sora AI video app, which reached one million downloads in less than five days, and this week he gave the keynote address at OpenAI’s DevDay in San Francisco, which was attended by around 1,500 developers.
At DevDay, Altman announced the general availability of Codex, OpenAI’s software engineering agent, and said Sora 2 is now included in the application programming interface (API) and can be tested by programmers. He also took the stage with iPhone designer Jony Ive, who joined OpenAI in May as part of a $6.4 billion talent recruitment effort with a mission to develop AI hardware.
Ive wasn’t clear about what exactly he’s building, and he told Altman on stage that he hopes to create tools that “make us happy and fulfilled and more peaceful and less anxious and less disconnected.”
Read more CNBC reports on AI
OpenAI has clearly positioned itself as the defining company of the generative AI era. It follows other category-defining consumer internet brands of the last few decades, viz Amazon in e-commerce and cloud infrastructure, Google in web search and digital ads, Facebook on social media and Apple in mobile apps.
In these market booms, successful startups were born, and many more failed for a variety of reasons, including the inability to find a large enough market to build a sustainable business or sell directly.
Mobile app developers were forced to reach users through extremely crowded Apple and Google app stores. Facebook and Google became the necessary channels to find customers on the Internet, and Amazon Web Services became the preferred platform for startups to launch their businesses – as a more efficient alternative to buying their own servers.
In each case, the big platform companies released tools and features that directly competed with, and sometimes wiped out, their customers.
“Gold rush mentality”
Ethan Kurzweil, managing partner of Chemistry Ventures, said the biggest difference today is speed.
AI startups are being founded and rapidly growing to historic levels, and OpenAI is moving even faster, launching services that compete with AI coding tools, agent kits, and other apps running on ChatGPT.
“It’s the fastest time in startup creation and disruption in my 17 years as an investor,” said Kurzweil, who spent the first 16 of those years at Bessemer Venture Partners before starting Chemistry in 2024.
Kurzweil said that OpenAI does a lot of things that are “theoretically scary for a lot of people” but that there is a “gold rush mentality where a lot of companies will do well.”
A prevailing view is that AI startups should target industries that are highly regulated or have other dynamics that make them less likely to opt for general AI services.
In healthcare, Heidi Health and DUOS announced large rounds this week, while EvenUp and Spellbook raised hefty amounts of capital to chase lawyers.
“There are many areas, such as finance and healthcare, where buyers want someone who speaks their language,” Kurzweil said.
At the end of September, Chemistry hosted an event with OpenAI operations manager Brad Lightcap. Kurzweil said a big topic of conversation among attendees was that there were no “technical divides.”
This is evident at the base model level, where OpenAI competes against Anthropic, Google, Meta and others.
Rather, the companies’ advantage lies in their dynamism, which explains why OpenAI has recently secured high-profile contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars with major tech companies while also bringing more apps and features to its rapidly growing user base.
OpenAI burns tons of money without having to worry about Wall Street’s reaction.
“There is no accounting because none of the companies are publicly traded,” Achadjian said, referring particularly to OpenAI and Anthropic, which last month said they had raised $13 billion at a valuation of $183 billion. “This further fuels the exuberance of capital raising, capital spending and vertical integration.”
Representatives for OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at OpenAI DevDay, the company’s annual developer conference, in San Francisco, California, on October 6, 2025.
Benjamin Legendre | AFP | Getty Images
According to the National Venture Capital Association and Pitchbook’s second-quarter report, growth-stage venture capital investment totaled $83.9 billion, driven by more than $5 billion in AI deals.
On an annual basis, that would far exceed the peak in 2021, when $96.1 billion was deployed during the growth phase.
“AI continues to dominate the upper end of the deal spectrum,” the report said.
Exa Labs, which describes its product as “search built for AI,” raised an $85 million Series B round in September from investors including Nvidia at a valuation of $700 million. Founded in 2021, Exa launched its first search engine in November 2022, two weeks before the release of ChatGPT.
“It would be really surprising to see a company that doesn’t compete with OpenAI,” Exa co-founder Jeff Wang said in an interview this week. “We’re in the same boat as everyone else.”
But Wang said OpenAI is an asset to his startup and the broader ecosystem because it develops tools that improve other companies’ products.
Wang said that while OpenAI may be present in the search market – many people now use ChatGPT instead of Google – the new world we are entering is not dominated by a single search engine.
Wang said hobbyists and people developing AI products pay for Exa’s service and that it is used by companies that have specific and “gigantic needs.”
“The pie is really big, and OpenAI is just one company,” Wang said.
—CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos and Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
REGARD: OpenAI’s deal tour
Comments are closed.