When Thrive Capital set up a company, Thrive Holdings, this year to buy up and consolidate services providers like accounting firms, a key goal was to transform the businesses by imbuing them with artificial intelligence.
Now one of Thrive Holdings’ main partners, OpenAI, is getting more deeply invested in that plan.
OpenAI is expected to announce on Monday that it is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, and that it will embed A.I. specialists at Thrive Holdings’ companies, which already include an accounting business and an I.T. services one.
The move comes amid the continuing rush by businesses to adopt A.I. as a competitive advantage. And for OpenAI, the hope is that working more closely with Thrive Holdings will demonstrate how companies can harness the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot — and create buzz to entice other potential customers.
“What we’re trying to do with this partnership is really prove out ways that we can accelerate that type of transformation,” Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, said in an interview.
The search for new business comes at a crucial moment for OpenAI: The company is valued at $500 billion by investors and has committed about $1.4 trillion in infrastructure spending by 2033 — justified by what it expects will be hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue by 2030.
Its competitors are not standing still. Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, is getting wider distribution because of partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s longtime backers. And Google has won plaudits for, and gained billions in market value on, the promise of its latest A.I. model.
Yet OpenAI has been busy courting new business, something that it hopes deeper involvement with Thrive Holdings will help with.
Thrive Capital created Thrive Holdings this year, with an initial $1 billion in funding. The vehicle aims to do serial deal-making — known in financial lingo as roll-ups — in relatively humdrum industries that it says would benefit from A.I., a strategy that other venture capital firms have embarked on.
Thrive Holdings’ two current operations, the accounting business Crete Professionals Alliance and the I.T. services provider Shield Technology Partners, have more than 1,000 employees in total. Thrive Holdings has committed $500 million to Crete, which the trade publication Accounting Today described this year as one of the fastest-growing accounting firms in the United States.
Thrive Holdings and the investment firm ZBS Partners have committed more than $100 million in Shield, which is on track to strike 10 acquisitions by year end.
But Thrive Holdings was also meant to help modernize how these companies operate, akin to what Thrive Capital and its founder, Josh Kushner, have done with the health insurer Oscar Health. (Mr. Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.) That includes thinking about how to overhaul their business practices, and not just eke out slightly better operating margins.
Crete, for example, has been working to use the technology to automate tasks such as data entry and processing tax returns to help free up accountants to work more directly with clients.
“We think A.I. has the promise of making these industries much more human,” Kareem Zaki, a Thrive Capital partner who also runs investment strategy at Thrive Holdings, said in an interview.
Thrive Holdings was always meant to draw on the expertise of OpenAI, in which Thrive Capital has been a prominent backer.
Now the A.I. giant is expected to embed researchers and engineers in Thrive Holdings’ companies. And OpenAI will help to create customized models for Crete and Shield, according to Anuj Mehndiratta, a partner at Thrive Capital who oversees product and technology strategy at Thrive Holdings.
After Thrive Holdings was created, Mr. Lightcap and Mr. Kushner started talking about how to better make A.I. a core technology for fast-growing companies. Those conversations led to OpenAI’s taking an ownership stake, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.
(Financial details of the arrangement were not immediately available.)
“We think the impact A.I. has in businesses and in the enterprise is going to be actually transformative,” Mr. Lightcap said. “That could happen on a near-term timeline. And we’re trying to figure out how to kind of make that happen as fast as we can.”
