OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO. No listing date yet, but the company is valued at roughly $852 billion and reportedly burning through $10 billion a year on infrastructure. Still not profitable.
That matters if your sales tech stack depends on them. A lot of tools run OpenAI models under the hood: your CRM assistant, your email writer, your call summarisation tool. You are renting from a landlord you have not vetted, and that landlord is about to face public market scrutiny.
The vendor dependency problem
OpenAI holds a 26% stake in itself through the OpenAI Foundation. Microsoft owns 27%. Employees and other investors own the rest. The company raised $40 billion in April 2025 at a $300 billion valuation, then hit $500 billion in October. Now it is prepping for public markets while still figuring out how to turn infrastructure costs into sustainable profit.
For sales teams, this creates three risks:
Pricing pressure. Wall Street will demand margin discipline. That burn rate will not fly with public investors. Expect enterprise pricing to change, possibly fast.
Product prioritisation shifts. Private OpenAI optimised for product-market fit and scale. Public OpenAI will optimise for quarterly revenue. If your use case does not drive enterprise ARR, it may get deprioritised.
Lock-in without transparency. Until the prospectus lands, you have limited visibility into OpenAI's finances, risks, or long-term economics. You are building on a foundation you cannot inspect.
What this means for ANZ sales leaders
OpenAI has broad market presence in ANZ through ChatGPT and Azure integrations, but no confirmed local scale or sales team size. If your sales ops depend on OpenAI-powered tools, ask:
- What happens if pricing doubles?
- Do we have fallback providers? Anthropic, Google, or open models?
- Can we migrate data and workflows if we need to switch?
Anthropic reportedly started its own IPO process last week. The foundation model vendors are all heading toward public markets, which means enterprise customers will finally get financial transparency. But it also means the rules will change.
The AI strategy risk is not the technology. It is betting your go-to-market motion on a vendor whose business model is still unproven. OpenAI filed confidentially, so we will know more when the prospectus drops. Until then, if your tech stack has a landlord, make sure you know the lease terms.