OpenAI

10/10
Late-stage private company / scale-upPrivate; has raised multiple rounds and strategic investments, including a reported $1B investment from Microsoft in 2019 and a later multi‑billion dollar strategic investment from Microsoft (reported in 2023).San Francisco, California, USA

Description

AI research and product company that develops large language models and consumer-facing products such as ChatGPT and the GPT series of models.

Why in News

A German court ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT violated German copyright law by training its models on licensed musical works without permission and ordered the company to pay damages.

Founders

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman

Published

January 20, 2026

Website

https://openai.com

Analysis

Directly about OpenAI and its AI model (ChatGPT) — clearly an AI company and central to AI startup ecosystem coverage.