🧙🏼 OpenAI raises $6.6 billion

Howdy, wizards.

Here’s what’s lighting up the sky in AI today.

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1. OpenAI raises $6.6 billion in the largest VC deal of all time

Led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI just completed its funding round, raising $6.6 billion at a $157 billion post-money valuation. Investors include Microsoft, Nvidia, Softbank and more (but not Apple). The deal is the biggest ever, topping Elon Musk’s $6 billion raised with xAI earlier this year.

OpenAI says they’ll use the new funding to double down on leadership in AI research, increase compute capacity, and product development, stating their goal is to “shape an AI-powered ecosystem and future that benefits everyone”.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The deal in itself is record-breaking, and the valuation makes OpenAI third most valuable VC-backed startup behind ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

There’s some interesting context here:

• OpenAI is planning to shift to a for-profit structure – and the investors in this round reportedly have a clause that allows them to get their money back if this transition doesn’t happen within two years.

• CEO Sam Altman is set to get some equity. Some unnamed sources were saying it could be up to 7%, but Altman denies this, telling employees it’s “just not true” that he will receive high equity during an all-hands meeting last Thursday.

• OpenAI’s statement that they will “double down on leadership” does feel a bit ironic with the trend of key executives leaving the company lately.

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2. 6 real-world company AI use cases from finance

As I continue looking into Google’s 185 real-world gen AI use cases by industry, I found 17 from finance. Several of them are using Gemini inside Google SecOps for huge efficiency gains.

Here’s my favourite ones:

• BBVA, Charles Schwab, Fiserv and Apex Fintech are all using Gemini in Google SecOps to more rapidly summarize threats, find answers, and detect, validate, and respond to security events. BBVA and Apex Fintech are both cited saying the process takes seconds, when it previously took minutes or even hours.

• Bank of New York Mellon built a chatbot for internal use to help employees find relevant information and answers to their questions.

• Discover Financial’s 10,000 employees at their contact center use AI during calls to search and synthesize information across detailed policies and procedures.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Finance is a high-stakes industry where accuracy is crucial. The use cases show how major corporations are getting confident enough in AI’s retrieval capabilities to use it in real-time settings for decision making.

Like these insights? You can also explore an organized table of the use cases that I made here for free. The premium version now also has categorization by country, in addition to difficulty and industry.

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