OpenAI has spoken with banks including Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. about working on its upcoming initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
Citigroup and JPMorgan could join Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley on the preparations for the listing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.
OpenAI filling out its roster of underwriters would bring it a step closer to an IPO, which could come later this year. A confidential IPO filing by the maker of ChatGPT is expected within weeks, Bloomberg News has reported.
Discussions with Citigroup and JPMorgan may not result in them joining the lineup for the IPO, the people said. It’s likely other investment banks will end up working on the listing, too, they added.
Representatives for OpenAi, Citigroup and JPMorgan declined to comment.
The IPO would follow the listing of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, expected to be the largest of all time at $75 billion, but would put it out in front of rival artificial intelligence company Anthropic PBC, which is also expected to launch a jumbo-sized offering later this year or early next.
In the past year, OpenAI has seen heightened competition, particularly from Anthropic, which was once considered the underdog in AI. But the company’s revenue has been increasing at a rapid pace thanks to advances in its AI agent tools, grabbing market share from enterprise customers.
Anthropic announced on Thursday that it raised $65 billion in a funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, eclipsing OpenAI’s last reported valuation of $852 billion.
