OpenAI is set to sell shares worth $6 billion as part of a secondary sale that would value the company at around $500 billion. The shares will be sold by current and former employees to investors including SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital, according to CNBC.
The talks are still in early stages, and the details can change. While these three firms are existing investors in OpenAI, Thrive Capital is expected to lead the round, as reported earlier.
The secondary share investment is on top of SoftBank’s commitment to lead OpenAI’s $40 billion funding round, which values the company at $300 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. That round remains ongoing with OpenAI recently securing $8.3 billion from a syndicate of investors.
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This share sale will give OpenAI employees an opportunity to get cash-rich during a time of intense competition between top AI companies. Companies like Meta have offered massive salaries in an attempt to recruit leading talent from OpenAI and other companies. Several top OpenAI employees have recently exited the company to join Meta.
Negotiating share sales for employees is a tactic often used 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 per Bloomberg. Current and former employees who spent at least two years at the company are able to participate.
In addition to this, SoftBank also closed a separate $1 billion purchase of OpenAI employee shares at a $300 billion valuation. Negotiation for that deal reportedly started before talks for the secondary evaluation began.
This valuation will make OpenAI the most highly valued startup, overtaking Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The company expects revenue to triple this year to $12.7 billion, up from $3.7 billion.
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CEO Sam Altman shared his vision for the company to a group of reporters this week. He mentioned there were plans to spend trillions of dollars on the infrastructure required to run AI services in the “not very distant future.” “You should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands and say, ‘This is so crazy, it’s so reckless,’ and whatever,” Altman said. “And we’ll just be like, ‘You know what? Let us do our thing.’”
The secondary sale comes shortly after the release of GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest AI model. Altman had greatly hyped up the model, saying it was “the best model in the world,” and said it represented a “significant step” along the company’s path to developing AI that can outperform humans at most economically valuable work — that is, artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, the user response to the model was a lot more mixed with several users unfavorably, comparing it to GPT-4o.