OpenAI has told investors its third-quarter revenue surged nearly 50% quarter-over-quarter to $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, marking a rebound after a period of slowing growth as demand recovered for its latest models and enterprise products.
During a conference call held on Tuesday local time, OpenAI disclosed some of its financial metrics to investors. The company is currently seeking to complete a new funding round that could value it at $1.25 trillion.
The company's third-quarter revenue growth rate not only exceeded the 17% quarter-over-quarter increase in the second quarter, but was also 2.6 times the growth rate of the same period last year.
Strong demand for several recently released models, including GPT 5.6, Astra, and various image generation models, drove growth in sales of models offered through its application programming interface (API).
In addition, growth in advertising revenue also boosted the company's overall top line — in August, the annualized revenue scale of that business reached $1 billion.
It remains unclear what OpenAI's operating losses and cash burn look like. Earlier this year, the company projected its full-year cash burn would reach $25 billion.
At least on the revenue front, OpenAI still lags behind competitor Anthropic. For the third quarter through September, Anthropic reported revenue of nearly $17 billion, up 47% from the second quarter. Anthropic's revenue overtook OpenAI's in the second quarter of this year, as its focus on building tools for enterprises, including its popular Claude Code coding tool and Claude Cowork agent, paid off.
OpenAI initially started as a consumer app company and later fought hard to capture a bigger share of the developer market. It began devoting more resources to its own coding tool Codex, abandoned projects such as a video app, and actively sought more partnerships with large enterprises.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman said last week that OpenAI's enterprise business doubled in the third quarter and now accounts for the bulk of the company's revenue.
Unlike Anthropic, OpenAI still has a massive consumer business. The company said last month that its weekly active users have reached 1.2 billion, the vast majority of whom use the platform for free. According to people familiar with the matter, the company's paying users approached 100 million in the third quarter.
The person added that during the period, the company added about 200 million non-paying users and 22 million paying users.
OpenAI has been trying to generate revenue from its consumer business through advertising; that business reached an annualized revenue scale of $1 billion in August, making advertising a highlight within its operations.
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