OpenAI adds to circular deals by taking stake in Thrive Holdings
OpenAI has taken a stake in Thrive Holdings, deepening its web of circular investments as the two firms partner to accelerate enterprise adoption of AI.
OpenAI has taken a minority stake in Thrive Holdings, marking yet another tight, circular deal between the ChatGPT maker and one of its biggest financial backers.
In a joint announcement, OpenAI and Thrive Holdings said they will partner to accelerate enterprise adoption of AI across Thrive’s portfolio, beginning with accounting and IT services.
As part of the deal, OpenAI will embed teams directly inside Thrive-owned companies to overhaul workflows with its latest models and “boost speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency”.
Neither company disclosed the size of OpenAI’s stake.
Thrive Holdings launched earlier this year as a spin-out investment vehicle from Thrive Capital, the firm run by Josh Kushner.
Known for making concentrated, long-term bets, Thrive has increasingly positioned itself around AI: it first invested in OpenAI in 2023 at a $27 billion valuation, then led a mammoth $6.6 billion round later that same year that ballooned the company’s valuation to $157 billion.
Thrive Holdings pushes that strategy further, adopting a quasi–private equity model to build or acquire companies that can fully leverage bleeding-edge AI.
For OpenAI, the partnership hits two pressure points at once: proving real business value for enterprise customers, and reducing the staggering costs of training and deploying frontier models.
Thrive COO Brad Lightcap said in a statement: “We hope this partnership serves as a model for how businesses and industries around the world can deeply partner with OpenAI.”
The move also raises fresh questions about OpenAI’s increasingly intertwined corporate ecosystem.
It follows a string of circular financial commitments around the company’s infrastructure push - from Nvidia’s pledge to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply millions of GPUs, to a later deal with AMD that will make OpenAI one of the chipmaker’s largest shareholders.
