O'Driscoll: Anthropic reaches $19B ARR while OpenAI hits $25B ARR
Rory O’Driscoll · OpenAI Kills Sora & Hits $100M ARR on Ads | Oura Going Public & Whoop Raises at $10BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Apr 2, 2026 · at 29:31
Rory O’Driscoll is a General Partner at Scale Venture Partners. He explains how leading AI research labs Anthropic and OpenAI calculate run-rate revenue based on trailing four-week billing averages.
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“Well, to be fair about Entropic and OpenAI, they have a very clear and sensible way they define ARR. What they say is they take the last, the average of the last four weeks to smooth out times to 13, because there were 1304 week periods in a year, which is more sensible than monthly because you have these varying months. So they're basically, what they're saying is realized revenue for the last Four weeks averaged, you know, the average of the last four weeks times 30, that outside, obviously if it's the average, it's times 52, but basically it's actual gap revenue. What did we bill for the last four The average calculator across the last four weeks to take into account how it is, that's their run rate, right? So it's actually pretty, it's not commit, to be fair to them, it's not committed to any of the bullshit kind of higher level stuff. It's actual money flowing through the system. And Tropic is roughly at 19 billion according, based on that kind of trailing four month, four week metric, and OpenAI is around 25.”
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