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OpenAI's annualized revenue hits $10 billion, up from $5.5 billion in December 2024
(www.reuters.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Can someone tell me if this is bad, good or normal?
It's...weird? Not normal, anyway.
Usually $10 billion worth of revenue has obvious products, services and outcomes it to point to.
$10 billion is a difficult to understand amount of money, and unusual for a relatively new software as a service company.
The first iPhone release completely transformed society within a few years...and earned about 1/10th that much revenue (6 million units at $700.00, if I've got my sums right). (Although I imagine Apple makes much more from the app store, than the devices.)
$10 billion is about 1/4 of the annual revenue of SalesForce, one of the most successful software as a service companies. SalesForce generates sales, which companies tend to be quite happy to pay for, of course.
So OpenAI doubling in revenue and hitting those kinds of numbers this soon is, odd. Unexpected.
To speculate a bit, it may be the kind of fortune enjoyed by folks who sold mining equipment to gold diggers during the gold rush.
There is presumably lots of speculative investment money flowing to companies that are promising big rewards from novel applications of the OpenAI technology. Of course they have to purchase the technology today, to deliver the huge novel profits next year...
I base this speculation the observation that there's usually sizeable amounts of money chasing hot new technologies.
Thats less than 50 million GPT plus subscriptions, even fewer if you factor in the more expensive subscriptions. Thats alot of subscriptions, but not an implausible number.
Good point.
That would put OpenAI around #5 on this list (by estimated subscriber count): https://largest.org/technology/largest-saas-businesses-by-number-of-subscribers/
Less than Microsoft, Google, SalesForce and Zoom - but higher than Slack, DropBox, and Adobe Creative Cloud.
It's surprising and rare for a relatively new company to jump that high in user base this quick.
It's surprising, but it's plausible. OpenAI and derived products do anecdotally seem about that popular, this year.
OpenAI reminds me in some ways of Netscape, except that it hasn't gone public yet, compared to the latter, which did so only 16 months after its founding.
That’s a strange list. OpenAI doesn’t only offer SaaS for end users, it also offers API access which puts it into the infrastructure game with the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (which actually offers OpenAI services and pushes them out to Windows users en masse).
They also have an API, I think a chunk of that revenue comes from there. Think 3rd party apps and services having chat bots, writing assistants, etc that use openai's API.