Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, will appear on CNBC’s Squawk Box on August 20, 2025.
CNBC
OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees at an all-hands meeting Wednesday that Artificial Intelligence Institute “will become a publicly traded company in 2027,” but a public debut could come sooner “if our business continues to grow.”
“An IPO is not the goal. It’s a milestone, it’s another round of financing,” Mr. Friar told employees, according to two people familiar with his comments who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “We raised $122 billion in March, so that gives us flexibility.”
OpenAI secretly filed an IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but has not said publicly when it plans to debut. As CNBC previously reported, the company’s biggest rival, Anthropic, has also secretly filed a prospectus with regulators and is holding initial testimonials with potential investors.
Frier told employees on Wednesday not to worry if Anthropic debuts before OpenAI.
“You know, we’re on the secret file and Anthropic is on the file. They could take the cover off that secret file in the next few weeks and it could be public in September. That’s fine. We’re running our own race,” Frier said, according to the person.
OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation ahead of its IPO, and investors want to take a closer look at the company’s financials.
During Wednesday’s all-hands meeting, Frier showed a series of slides to employees and said OpenAI’s revenue run rate increased 35% quarter-to-date, enterprise revenue run rate increased 50% quarter-to-quarter, and the company’s AI coding and work products reached 20 million weekly active users.
OpenAI told investors that second-quarter revenue was $6.7 billion, up 18% from the first quarter, according to a Wall Street Journal report late Wednesday. As previously reported by CNBC, the company’s annual revenue run rate recently exceeded $40 billion.
Meanwhile, Anthropic told investors over the weekend that its annual revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, a sevenfold increase from a year ago. As previously reported by CNBC, the company also revealed preliminary second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion.
