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

Khosla Ventures has raised $405 million for OpenAI, according to a regulatory filing.

Based on the filing alone, Khosla’s stake in the ChatGPT maker appears to be at least 6% of the $6.6 billion round the company closed last week. But that doesn’t mean Khosla has put substantial or any capital into the round. The majority or possibly all of the $405 million was pooled from other investors through a special purpose vehicle, or an SPV.

SPVs are used when a firm doesn’t have enough capital to fill a round, or when it has enough exposure to a company and offers its allocation to others clamoring for a stake.

Khosla Ventures declined to comment, so we don’t know the terms of its participation in OpenAI’s last round, which valued the firm at $157 billion. Either way, OpenAI has been good to Khosla Ventures, which invested $50 million in the company in 2019, for what The Information has since reported was 5% ownership. OpenAI’s valuation at the time isn’t publicly known, but likely it was significantly lower than the $29 billion valuation OpenAI reportedly garnered in 2023, when Microsoft invested $10 billion.