OpenAI Plans $10 Billion in Partnerships With PE Firms

OpenAI is reportedly looking to form partnerships with several private equity (PE) outfits.

That’s according to a report Monday (March 16) from Reuters, which says these arrangements, with the likes of TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital and Brookfield Asset Management, would involve OpenAI distributing its enterprise products among the firms’ clients.

The proposed deal, sources told Reuters, has a pre-money valuation of around $10 billion and could provide OpenAI with a quicker path to corporate adoption, while giving PE firms a lifeline for portfolio companies facing AI disruption.

According to the sources, both OpenAI and rival Anthropic are aggressively courting PE firms because they control enterprise companies and have some say in these businesses’ software and AI spending.

Under the proposal, the PE investors would contribute about $4 billion and receive equity stakes in the venture, as well as influence over how OpenAI’s technology is deployed at their portfolio companies, two of the sources said.

TPG would act as the anchor investor, putting up the most money, while Advent, Bain, and Brookfield would be co-founding investors. All four PE firms would have board seats in the joint venture, sources told Reuters.

In addition, the report continued, the partnership would offer PE firms early access to OpenAI’s enterprise tools with the potential to benefit when adoption moves beyond their portfolio firms.

PYMNTS has contacted OpenAI for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

As covered here last month, the growth of enterprise AI is emerging at a critical juncture in the enterprise software landscape. Following years of software lockups across inflexible and monolithic solutions, corporate customers are increasingly asking for more from their B2B vendors now that they know better tools are available.

“For B2B payments, this moment is especially consequential. Payments sit at the intersection of finance, operations, risk and trust,” PYMNTS wrote. “They are repetitive, data-rich and historically manual, representing exactly the sort of environment where AI should shine. At the same time, they are unforgiving when it comes to workflow failures and downtime.”

The challenge for C-suite executives, as the report added, is distinguishing between AI applications that genuinely improve decision quality and resilience and those that merely accelerate existing inefficiencies or could ultimately prove too fragile for the security-critical heavy lifting performed by many enterprise systems.

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence – from the report “Smart Spending: How AI Is Transforming Financial Decision Making” – found that more than 8 in 10 CFOs at large companies were either already deploying artificial intelligence or considering adopting it.