Morningstar Unveils Index Tracking Private GenAI Titans: OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic & More
Wall Street's favorite fund tracker just gave private AI a ticker symbol.
Morningstar—the firm that tells your grandma which mutual fund to buy—has launched a first-of-its-kind index designed to track the performance of the most valuable private companies in generative artificial intelligence. The spotlight lands squarely on the usual suspects: Sam Altman's OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI, and Dario Amodei's Anthropic.
Why This Index Matters
For years, retail investors and institutional funds alike have watched the GenAI gold rush from the sidelines. These companies aren't public. Their financials are opaque. Getting a piece of the action meant being a venture capitalist or a privileged pre-IPO investor. Morningstar's new index aims to cut through the fog, creating a benchmark that quantifies the value explosion happening behind closed doors.
It's a data play for a market starving for signals.
The Mechanics of Tracking Ghosts
So how do you track companies that don't trade? The index reportedly uses a cocktail of alternative data—secondary market transactions, funding round valuations, and proprietary modeling—to estimate performance. Think of it as a financial sonar pinging the private markets. The goal is to provide a daily NAV (Net Asset Value) proxy, giving the world a number to watch when these firms aren't required to show their cards.
A Cynical Take from Finance
Let's be real: this is also a brilliant way to monetize FOMO. Can't invest directly? Here's an index fund that will inevitably follow. It's the financialization of hype, wrapped in a respectable Morningstar wrapper. First, they create the benchmark. Then, the products to track it. Fees follow. Always.
The Bigger Picture for Tech and Crypto
This move signals a pivotal shift. The largest wealth-creation engine of this decade is happening in private markets, and traditional finance is scrambling to build bridges. For the crypto-native crowd, it's a familiar story—creating liquid trackers for illiquid assets is the whole premise of tokenization. Morningstar is just doing it the old-fashioned way, with spreadsheets instead of smart contracts.
Watch this space. When the gatekeepers of mainstream finance start building tools to measure private tech, the path to the public markets—or a new kind of digital market—gets shorter. The valuation numbers this index spits out won't just be data points; they'll be battle lines for the next IPO wave or a catalyst for on-chain asset bridges. The game isn't just about building AI; it's about building the market for it.
Morningstar tracks GenAI companies using private data
Morningstar’s new tool is meant to publish daily updates tracking valuation changes across 20 GenAI companies, based on funding rounds and revaluations with updates coming from PitchBook’s data.
The point is to show how the sector is moving, even when these companies don’t report anything publicly.
Sanjay said one major tech company is already planning to use the index to benchmark its own investments, though he wouldn’t say which one for reasons we do not know.
The index also includes Databricks, Mistral AI, and Cohere.
This isn’t Morningstar’s first foray into private markets either. It’s already running another index that tracks 20 late-stage VC-backed companies with $1 billion+ valuations.
By the end of 2025, almost half of all Index Industry Association members, including MSCI and S&P Dow Jones, had all either launched or announced their own private market indexes.
Sanjay also said that GenAI companies are raising funds more often than they used to. Which means their valuations are changing more often, too.
“If this is going to be a huge part of the economy, I guess you want to see how this segment of the market is growing,” Sanjay explained.
OpenAI and Anthropic target the same market yet again; healthcare
While Morningstar tracks the financial side, OpenAI and Anthropic are getting deep into healthcare. On Thursday, OpenAI said it’s launching a new version of ChatGPT made for clinicians. It’s supposed to help with medical case reviews, tailored care, and cutting down admin work.
The tool comes with citations from verified medical sources and follows HIPAA rules for handling private health data. The rollout has already started at places like Boston Children’s Hospital, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Cedars-Sinai.
The day before that, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, which lets regular users analyze medical tests, prep for doctor visits, and get input on workouts or diets. It’s not a substitute for real doctors, but the idea is to be a helpful add-on. It shows a clear effort by OpenAI to push their product deeper into everyday use and into sectors that deal with personal data.
Anthropic, led by a former biophysicist, is also doubling down on this area. The company rolled out updates to its Claude chatbot, aiming to speed up scientific research. It’s even holding an event next week focused entirely on its health care strategy. Top execs will lay out where they’re heading.
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