ChatGPT's mobile app has just hit a new record of $3 billion in consumer spending.
And alongside that, OpenAI is reportedly trying to raise 100 billion more at 830 billion valuation.
So today on the podcast, we're gonna be breaking down everything that OpenAI is planning, where we see this going in the future, what this 100 billion is going to be used for and where they're saying they're going to be this time next year.
We're gonna get into a whole bunch of OpenAI by the numbers kind of look at the history of where they've been and where they're going.
Before we do that, I wanted to say that this episode is sponsored by Delve.
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All right, let's talk first about ChatGPT's mobile app.
New record in how much consumer spending is happening on the app, which is 3 billion.
According to an estimate from app intelligence provider AppFigures, this is the total spending on iOS and Android devices since it launched back in 2023 right.
So this isn't like annual or this isn't.
You know.
There's no sort of like monthly recurring revenue tied to this.
This is just total spending, which could include a lot of people that might have paid and stopped paying, switched to a free tier.
And there are some interesting things with these numbers and kind of the growth rate on the numbers.
One of the biggest things I'm seeing as I'm looking at a chart of this, is when they first released their Android app back in July of 2023.
So May 2023, their iOS app came out.
July, their Android app came out.
Like, if you look at a chart, there's basically no revenue or it's so small compared to what it is today.
For over a year, May to May, So that's the entire first year of the app.
I mean, they're not even cracking $50 million in monthly recurring revenue or monthly revenue.
And that's when GPT-4.0 was first released.
That's when I first feel like they kind of got to maybe somewhere above 25 million, not even 50 million.
Um, they did see a little bit of a spike when advanced voice mode came out in july of last year and i think the time that they made kind of the biggest movement.
And here's one other thing that i will point out that's interesting about this.
It's not really about when a feature comes out and seen a spike.
It's kind of you want to look at the months after a feature comes out to see how successful that feature is, because as people are trying it, they're able to show it to people.
The word of mouth grows and it's the features that lead the growth and i i would say anytime that There's you see growth before a feature.
So it's kind of like hype.
You're going to.
Essentially, the product has a chance to disappoint if it doesn't, if the feature doesn't live up to the hype.
And I'll tell you when this happens, which looks sort of painful, and why I think OpenAI had kind of announced a code red.
So essentially, you see steady growth after the advanced voice mode came out.
That was obviously an incredible feature.
And you see steady growth all the way, you know, through February of 2025.
So that's kind of, you know, the lead up from advanced voice mode in July all the way to February.
We see steady growth going from somewhere around I would say 50 million to 100 million in monthly revenue that it was making.
And in February is when GPT 4.5 came out.
So this was a great product.
GPT 4.5 was kind of like, you know, the biggest flagship model.
Everyone expected that to be GPT 5, but it was 4.5.
And following that, we actually saw some insane growth.
So February was at about $100 million.
It almost doubled by March.
It went up to $150 million by the next month.
So you can see GPT-4.5 was a very popular product.
In April...
Then the next month, it went over $200 million.
So basically in two months, from February to April, we went from 100 million to over 200 million in monthly revenue.
GPT-4.5 was a smash success, I would say, by all metrics.
And of course, then we're getting into the release of GPT-5.
It's coming up soon because that came in August of the same year.
But what you will notice is May, June, July, August was a plateau.
So we saw this like huge kind of growth with GPT-4.5.
There was a plateau leading up to GPT-5.
So that by the time GPT-5 came around they, you know like they'd been getting close to 300 million, but it seems like it went up from maybe like 280 back down to 250 million when GPT-5 came up.
And there was a slight growth for the two months following GPT-5 September and October where it feels like it got to around 380 million.
But the next month in November of this year, so last month, it saw another dip.
So we see, basically from May of this year till November of this year, OpenAI has been struggling, on iOS and Android combined, to crack anything over 250 million in monthly revenue.
Now I mean, maybe there's an argument to be made about the size of the market using these tools, or the price point, or I think there's a lot of different things.
And I will also say that this, you know this 250 million, this is only the revenue that is being generated from the app.
So there's definitely like the enterprise that is using their APIs are spending way more money than this.
They have a lot of partnerships with large corporations.
So they have a lot of, you know, other revenue sources.
It's not like this is the only money they can make.
But it is interesting that they have really been struggling to grow.
Some people would say the market was sort of saturated.
One thing that's interesting about all of this is that ChatGPT was one of the most downloaded used apps of the year.
And so for one of the biggest apps.
Basically, it feels like they might have hit a ceiling on what they can squeeze out of the market.
So That's like some people's theory.
I personally actually don't subscribe to that.
I think that there's a lot more growth that they could see.
I think that it was the release of some big competitors, Google Gemini in particular, and maybe Claude gave them a little bit of a you know, ate away at a little bit of this.
But I think Google Gemini was the biggest slow down of their growth rate, that they would have seen more growth.
And so this is kind of what Sam Altman's concerned about.
It feels like for you know it's going to be close to a year that their revenue has kind of flatlined on us on their apps.
And hopefully this isn't something that drags into other things here.
So I think what's notable is that the bulk of all of the spending that did happen the total 3 billion took place this year.
Worldwide consumers spent about 284 billion on ChatGPT this year and that's about a 408 increase year over year from the 487 million spent in 2024.
And What I will also say is that in 2023, the app's first year of availability, it earned about 42 million.
So $42 million the first year, $487 million the next year, and then this year, $2.4 billion.
So that's The growth rate is incredible.
They have made an incredible amount of money.
But I will say the, you know, the growth rate isn't it feels like it has plateaued.
And I mean, plateauing at two, two and a half billion dollars is still amazing per year.
But it's just it doesn't you're not seeing kind of like an uptrend like we saw in the past.
All right, let's talk about what's going on with OpenAI's money that they're currently raising.
The Wall Street Journal initially reported on this.
They had some anonymous sources.
They said that OpenAI is currently trying to raise 100 billion to.
You know, make them worth 830 billion.
That'd be their valuation.
They're trying to do it by the end of the first quarter next year.
And they are currently looking at sovereign wealth funds to invest in this deal.
Now we saw that in the most recent deal that Anthropic raised, they also went to sovereign wealth funds.
And there was kind of this awkward moment where the CEO of Anthropic was like yeah, like we.
Sometimes we have to work with dictators or people we don't agree with.
But, you know, we got to grow the company.
And I don't know.
It seemed kind of like a weird comment to make about someone that's giving you a billion dollars.
The information was the first one to report the deal, although they said that OpenAI was trying to get a 750 billion price tag.
I've actually we've seen this in the past with deals where there's kind of these like pre leaks before the deal happens and the valuation goes up after the first leak.
So I do think this is interesting.
This is going to come at a time when OpenAI is already saying that they're going to spend trillions of dollars.
OpenAI has literally committed to spending trillions of dollars, making deals all around the world to build.
A lot of it is on AI and a lot of it is on the researchers, but a ton of that money is on data centers and compute.
And it's going to be a really incredible time to see them try to grow.
But I mean, if they've committed to spending trillions and they're, you know, sitting here trying to raise 100 billion, they need to raise a lot more and they need their company to make a lot more.
And of course, this is coming as there's a ton of competition.
I think OpenAI has also been rumored to be working on IPO.
That is kind of their next way to raise 10s of billions of dollars and fund their development efforts.
Because right now it's said that they're making an annual run rate revenue of about $20 billion.
So there's also rumors that they are talking with Amazon on some deals.
And we know that they recently did a $10 billion investment deal with Amazon.
So it seems like there is, you know, kind of more of those deals coming from institutions as well.
Overall, this is a huge time for OpenAI.
We're excited to follow them, see what they are spending the money on development and really building out compute that.
I think you know.
We have a lot of other exciting things on the horizon, whether they're working with Johnny Ive on hardware devices.
We know that A lot of this AI is going to go to power humanoid robots.
There's a lot of exciting things that this technology will be going into, and this money will be spent on.
It'll be interesting to see if they can just continue to raise more and more money or if there's going to be a ceiling on how much they can raise like it feels like there was a ceiling on the growth rate on their app revenue how much they're actually able to get out of consumers in certain mediums.
So that'll be definitely something interesting to follow.
Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast.
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Make sure to leave a rating and review for the show if you appreciated it, and I will catch you in the next episode.
