OpenAI is in the early stages of a share sale that could allow the employees to cash out, and value the company at $500 billion. Existing investors, including Thrive Capital are in discussions to participate, a source told Reuters. This valuation would be a huge step up from the current $300 billion.
OpenAI’s valuation has been on a rise ever since the company launched ChatGPT in late 2022, and established itself as the leader in generative AI. The company announced a $40 billion funding round in March at a $300 billion, the largest ever raised by a tech company. The funding round was led by SoftBank.
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Last week, the company announced its most recent $8.3 billion tranche tied to that funding round, which was oversubscribed by about five times. OpenAI reportedly managed to snag that funding ahead of schedule.
Major U.S. startups often negotiate share sales for their employees as a way to reward and retain staff, and also attract external investors. The company is looking to leverage investor demand to provide employees with liquidity that reflects the company’s growth, according to one of the people familiar with the investment negotiations, Bloomberg reported.
OpenAI also recently hit an actualized run rate of $12 billion, after doubling its revenue in the first seven months of 2025. The company also recently released two open-weight language models on Tuesday for the first time since it rolled out GPT-2 in 2019. The models aim to serve as lower-cost options that developers and researchers can easily run and customize, according to the company.
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According to previous reports by CNBC, OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue is projected to top $20 billion by year-end, up from $10 billion in June. Meanwhile, rival AI company Anthropic is in talks to secure between $3 billion and $5 billion in new funding led by Iconiq Capital at a potential $170 billion valuation, up from $61.5 billion in March.
OpenAI recently lost a number of its top employees to Meta’s superintelligence team. Meta offered these employees packages upwards of $100 million according to reports. Former OpenAI employees who joined Meta include researcher Trapit Bansal, who was a key player in starting the company’s work on reinforcement learning, and Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — three senior researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich team. A secondary sale might serve as a way to incentivize remaining at OpenAI.