In the OpenAI startup fund the early stage of AI investors who are affiliated with the OpenAI. That was recently disclosed in a financial filing that has raised over $44 million for its fifth special purpose vehicle which is the largest so far. Launched in 2021 this fund has an unusual structure. It also uses OpenAI’s name and says Open AI is not an investor.
Originally and legally it was controlled by OpenAI and the other two the co-founder and CEO Sam Altman along with the other OpenAI partners. Altman gave up the legal control to general partner Lan Hataway earlier this year.
VCs typically use the SPVs to pool money from the investors and invest outside their main fund. Therefore, the fund remains silent about exactly what these funds are for.
A spokesman from OpenAI said
“SPVs allow us to allocate capital to high-potential investments opportunistically.”
This fund was founded in 2021 and has been on a real SPV streak this year. This discloses the five separate vehicles that now total $114.2 million.
Despite a flurry of activity on its website being sparse, the most recent news was posted a year ago. The website disclosed that it only takes a few investments like the legal AI startup Harvey and the AI note-taking app Mem. Therefore the fund is more active than its website indications. The significant investment this year includes Thrive Health, an AI health venture between Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington, and warm outbound startup Unify.
The fund works like a seed investor in Any Sphere. It is currently in the middle of a VC bidding war thanks to its AI code assistant cursor.
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