Khosla Ventures just backed OpenAI with $405 million more, but not necessarily with its own capital

Khosla Ventures has raised $405 million for OpenAI, in response to the documents.

Based on the filing itself, Khosla’s stake in ChatGPT maker is not less than 6% from the $6.6 billion round the corporate accomplished last week. That doesn’t suggest Khosla put significant, or any, capital into this round. Most, perhaps all, of the $405 million was raised from other investors through a special purpose vehicle, or special purpose vehicle.

Special purpose vehicles are used when an organization does not have enough capital to fill a round, or when it has sufficient exposure to the corporate and offers its allocation to others demanding shares.

Khosla Ventures declined to comment, so we do not know the terms of its participation in OpenAI’s latest round, which valued the corporate at $157 billion. Either way, OpenAI has been good for Khosla Ventures, which invested $50 million in the corporate in 2019, and in response to The Information 5% ownership. OpenAI’s valuation on the time is not publicly known, but it was likely much lower than the $29 billion valuation OpenAI reportedly achieved in 2023 when Microsoft invested $10 billion.