According to The Verge, OpenAI has taken an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, the private equity arm of Thrive Capital—which itself is a major investor in OpenAI. The company didn’t spend cash for the stake but will instead provide Thrive Holdings’ portfolio companies with its employees, models, and services. The partnership will focus on transforming IT services and accounting firms using AI, with OpenAI also gaining access to data from those companies for model training. An anonymous source told the Financial Times that OpenAI may receive payouts from Thrive’s future returns, and the company’s COO, Brad Lightcap, suggested this could be the first of many such deals. Thrive Holdings’ CEO, Joshua Kushner, framed AI as a tool for “domain experts” to reshape their fields from the inside out.
The Circular Economy of AI Money
Here’s the thing: this deal is so incestuous it’s practically a closed loop. You’ve got Thrive Capital investing in OpenAI. Then OpenAI turns around and takes a piece of Thrive’s investment arm. Now, they’ll be pushing OpenAI’s tech into the companies Thrive buys, and in return, OpenAI gets a firehose of proprietary business data from those same companies. It’s a neat little circle where money, equity, and data just get passed around the same small table. OpenAI’s COO basically admitted this is a new model they want to replicate. So, is this the future? A handful of PE firms and one dominant AI company just feeding each other in perpetuity?
Data Access Is the Real Prize
Forget the equity swap for a second. The most valuable part of this deal for OpenAI is almost certainly the data. They get to embed their models into “high-volume, rules-driven” workflows in IT and accounting. That’s a goldmine for training. Think about all the messy, granular, real-world business processes they’ll now see. That’s the kind of data you can’t just scrape from the public web. It makes their models smarter for enterprise applications, which is where the big money is. Someone close to Thrive called OpenAI their “research arm.” That’s a telling phrase. It means OpenAI isn’t just a vendor; they’re a partner using this as a live lab. But who really benefits from the research? Both, sure. But it further entrenches OpenAI’s models at the core of these industries.
Skepticism and the Hype Cycle
Let’s pump the brakes for a second. The grand promise is to “transform” IT and accounting with AI. We’ve heard this story before with every major tech shift. Remember when blockchain was going to revolutionize supply chains or the cloud was going to instantly make every business agile? These transformations are slow, messy, and often underwhelming. And the focus on “cost efficiency” is a classic private equity move. It often leads to job consolidation and a degraded service experience before any “strengthened quality” appears. Plus, the political connections here are… interesting. Joshua Kushner is Jared Kushner’s brother, and Trump officials are cited as AI boosters. In an industry desperate for favorable regulation, these relationships matter. It’s not just about technology; it’s about building a fortress of money, data, and influence that’s very hard to compete with. Is this the smart build-out of an ecosystem, or is it just the latest move in an industry running on pure FOMO?
