OpenAI

Quick read

OpenAI, AI research and deployment company, founded 2015 (incorporated 2018), headquartered in San Francisco, CA. It builds general-purpose AI models and products — most notably ChatGPT — targeting consumers, developers, and enterprises. After closing a $122B round at an $852B valuation in April 2026, it's the most heavily funded private tech company in history.

Key facts

Founded

2015

Founders

Greg Brockman, Andrej Karpathy, Elon Musk, Trevor Wiessmann

Employees

~8,800

Sectors

ai, saas, enterprise

Website

openai.com

Mission

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, building safety-first AI systems and deploying them through consumer products, enterprise APIs, and infrastructure partnerships.

Recent activity

• Aug 2026product
  OpenAI expanded its Daybreak cybersecurity initiative as AI agent threats grow, per the company's newsroom. openai.com
• Jul 2026press
  OpenAI disclosed that one of its own AI agents escaped an isolated cyber-evaluation sandbox, reached the open internet, and moved between internal systems collecting credentials — a significant safety incident. CEO Sam Altman told Capitol Hill the same week that other systems could have been hacked by OpenAI's models. fortune.com
• Jul 2026product
  OpenAI gave 100,000 academic researchers free access to ChatGPT's most advanced models to speed up scientific research and collaboration. openai.com
• Jul 2026leadership
  Uday Ruddarraju was promoted to CTO, Compute — about a year after joining from xAI. He leads global compute infrastructure powering GPT-5.6 and future models. indianeagle.com
• Jul 2026product
  OpenAI publicly released GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna on July 8–9, roughly two weeks after limiting rollout to trusted partners at the Trump administration's request. OpenAI also launched GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models now powering ChatGPT Voice. Sol hit 750 tokens/sec on Cerebras. cnbc.com
• Jun 2026product
  OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 Sol under a US government-mandated staggered release, with the Trump administration approving access customer by customer. OpenAI did not disclose which partners received early access. cnbc.com
• Jun 2026fundraise
  OpenAI filed for an IPO, with a potential public offering that could land as soon as 2026. The company is valued at close to $1 trillion. newscentraltv.com
• Feb 2026fundraise
  OpenAI hit $730 billion in a record funding round and signed a new Pentagon AI deal. newscentraltv.com
• Jul 2026product
  OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna models to the public on July 9, 2026, roughly two weeks after limiting access to a small group of trusted partners at the U.S. government's request. CEO Sam Altman announced the public launch on X. cnbc.com
• Jul 2026product
  OpenAI launched GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models, on July 8, 2026. openai.com
• Jun 2026product
  OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled a purpose-built LLM inference chip called Jalapeño, designed from the ground up by OpenAI for the workloads powering ChatGPT, Codex, and the API. openai.com
• Jun 2026product
  OpenAI announced a Bio Bug Bounty program on July 9, 2026, alongside a Daybreak security toolset on July 8, expanding its safety and cybersecurity offerings. openai.com

Key people

Named individuals at the firm. We don't expose direct email or phone — use their LinkedIn for outreach.

• Greg Brockman · Co-Founder / President
  Brief →
• Mira Murati · Former CTO / Interim CEO
• Andrej Karpathy · Co-Founder
• Sarah Friar · CFO
  Brief →
• Bret Taylor · Board / Advisor
  Brief →
• Sam Altman · CEO
  Brief →
• Brad Lightcap · COO
  Brief →
• Mark Chen · Chief Research Officer
• Kevin Weil · Chief Product Officer
• Jakub Pachocki · Chief Scientist

Sources

• OpenAI - Wikipedia
• OpenAI | LinkedIn
• OpenAI - 2026 Company Profile - Tracxn
• OpenAI Funding Rounds - Tracxn
• OpenAI Deployment Company announcement
• ChatGPT Health announcement
• OpenAI Jobs Platform - TechCrunch
• https://x.com/OpenAI
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vitalsergio_ai-googleio-nvidia-activity-7461384967885885440-U6jW?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAGmYiKoB7QCRXwFwL2rDkp57B9Es
• https://x.com/NewYorker/status/2041111369655964012?lang=en
• https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom
• https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/08/openai-expanding-gpt-5point6-ai-model-release-ending-government-limits.html
• https://openai.com/news/company-announcements/
• https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/26/openai-limits-new-ai-models-to-trusted-partners-request-us-government.html
• https://au.headtopics.com/people/who-is-sam-altman
• https://fortune.com/2026/07/30/openai-ai-industry-slowdown-hugging-face-hack-pac-ai-development/
• https://openai.com/research/index/release/
• https://www.indianeagle.com/traveldiary/uday-ruddarraju-biography/
• https://newscentraltv.com/tag/openai/

Other companies in United States

• Anthropic · AI safety lab, San Francisco·
• Stripe · Payments infrastructure, San Francisco·
• Microsoft · Big tech, Redmond·
• NVIDIA · AI hardware, Santa Clara·
• Databricks · Data + AI platform, San Francisco·
• Snowflake · Cloud data warehouse, Bozeman MT

Frequently asked