OpenAI Holds Equity Stake in Thrive Holdings

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence powerhouse behind ChatGPT, has entered into a strategic partnership with Thrive Holdings (Holdings).

As part of the deal, OpenAI will acquire an equity stake in Holdings, with the goal of integrating cutting-edge AI into industries that have relied on largely unchanged workflows and systems for decades.

In a post on X, Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, stated, “This collaboration will bring together a uniquely cross-functional team—combining OpenAI’s leading research and applied AI experts with Holdings’ engineers, operators, and domain specialists—to deeply embed AI into the businesses we own and operate.”

Kushner added that the partnership will involve training advanced AI models for specific tasks within Holdings’ portfolio companies, “guided by proprietary company data and expert feedback.”

Further financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed at the time of announcement.

“OpenAI now has fair and trained models tailored to company-specific tasks,” noted Sheel Mohnot, General Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, in a separate X post.

Many others echoed similar sentiments, suggesting the partnership could open new avenues for training OpenAI’s models using real-world operational data.

Holdings is a newly formed holding company established by Thrive Capital in 2025 to acquire and operate businesses in traditional service sectors such as accounting and information technology.

Thrive Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm founded in 2009, has backed numerous prominent tech companies and is a long-standing investor in OpenAI.

In 2024, the firm led OpenAI’s landmark $6.6 billion funding round, committing approximately $1 billion.

Recent reports on secondary sales of OpenAI employee shares revealed that Thrive was among the buyers—an investment that reportedly helped push OpenAI’s post-debt valuation to around $500 billion.

This has sparked fresh scrutiny over the nature of such circular investment arrangements.

According to the latest reports, OpenAI’s valuation has now surged to $750 billion.