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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - 2025/02/04: Open AI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman speaks during the Kakao media day in Seoul. South Korean tech giant Kakao Corp. on February 4 announced partnership with OpenAI to use ChatGPT on its new artificial intelligence (AI) service joining a global alliance led by the U.S. AI company amid intensifying competition in the global AI market. (Photo by Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) | Image Credits:Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, whose parent company is one of the AI giant’s major investors, Thrive Capital.
Thrive Holdings operates like a private equity firm for AI, rolling up companies that it believes could benefit from the tech in sectors like accounting and IT services.
Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal, but it will involve OpenAI sending employees from its engineering, research, and product teams to work within Thrive’s companies to accelerate AI adoption and boost efficiency. If those companies succeed, OpenAI’s stake will grow, and it will get compensated for its services, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The partnership follows a pattern of circular dealmaking for the $500 billion AI giant, which also recently took stakes in infrastructure partners like Advanced Micro Devices and CoreWeave. For instance, OpenAI invested $350 million of equity into CoreWeave, which used the funds to buy Nvidia chips. Those same chips provide compute to OpenAI, which increases CoreWeave’s revenue and in the end makes OpenAI’s stake more valuable.
The Thrive deal has a different structure, but the result is still interdependence. Here is how it will work. OpenAI embeds its own workers to build products and implement systems in Thrive’s portfolio companies. OpenAI profits when those companies scale based on growth its work helped generate.Thrive Holdings pushed back on the circular characterization. A spokesperson emphasized the deal is “responding to an unmet need in the market” rather than creating demand and pointed to organic customer interest from portfolio companies like accounting firm Crete, which has reportedly saved hundreds of hours of work with AI tools, and IT firm Shield that predated the formal partnership.
But for outside investors, the embedded nature of OpenAI’s involvement – and the overlapping ownership with Thrive Capital holding stakes on both sides – makes it difficult to assess whether success stems from genuine market traction or from advantages that may not scale without OpenAI’s direct support.
Analysts will be watching to see if Thrive-owned firms actually succeed in building long-term profitable businesses using OpenAI’s tech, or if the result is really just pumped-up valuations based on speculative market potential.
This article was updated to provide more detail into the nature of the deal.
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