Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Tuesday, April 1st, and I'm your host, Kim Khan. Our top story so far.

OpenAI's latest funding round has propelled the startup beyond other unicorns to the rank of the highest valued private company in the world, according to some ranking systems.

The $40 billion funding round, which was done in partnership with SoftBank, has given the Microsoft-backed nonprofit a $300 billion valuation.

Its valuation is now nearly doubled since October 2024, when a $6.6 billion funding round gave the company a $157 billion post-money

valuation. OpenAI said the latest funding will help it further AI research, scale its compute

infrastructure, and deliver tools for the 500 million people who use chat GPT every week.

However, some of the latest funds come with a caveat from SoftBank, which requires

OpenAI to transition to an independent for-profit company by year's end.

According to a ranking compiled last month of the highest-valued unicorns in 2025 by

ECVista, OpenAI now easily ranks number one, surpassing TikTok parent bite dance.

The list is dominated by companies from the U.S., China, and India.

The top 10 are OpenAI at $300 billion,

Bight Dance at $220 billion,

Ant Group at $150 billion, SpaceX at $137 billion,

Reliance Retail at $100,

Shine at $66 billion, Stripe at $65 billion, Data Bricks at $62 billion, Reliance Retail at 100 billion, Shine at 66 billion, Stripe at 65 billion,

Data Bricks at 62 billion, Reliance Geo at 58 billion, and XAI at 50 billion.

On the economic front, the ISM Manufacturing Index fell into contraction territory

at 49 in March from 50.3 in February, trailing the 49.5 consensus. The contraction

last month, with the index below 50, followed two straight months of expansion, preceded by

26 consecutive months of contraction. During the month, demand and output weakened, while

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