OpenAI has completed a $7 billion tender offer that let current and former employees sell shares at an $852 billion valuation, the same figure the company carried after closing a record $122 billion funding round in March.
The transaction, finalized this week, is OpenAI's third such sale in two years: a $1.5 billion tender in 2024 was followed by a $6.6 billion offer in October at a $500 billion valuation, and now this $7 billion round at $852 billion, according to CNBC. Unlike a conventional fundraising round, the company bought back shares directly from employees rather than selling new stock to outside investors, giving staff a chance to cash out part of their holdings without OpenAI raising fresh capital. Each successive tender has needed a fresh group of buyers willing to purchase the shares from departing and current staff, typically drawn from the same pool of venture and sovereign-wealth investors that have backed OpenAI's primary funding rounds.
The sale comes two months after OpenAI submitted a confidential IPO prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, a step companies often take well before setting a public listing timeline. OpenAI has not said when, or whether, it will proceed to a public offering, and the company declined to comment on the completed transaction, according to Yahoo Finance.
Industry observers have read the repeated tenders as a sign that OpenAI is in no hurry to go public. Private secondary sales have become a standard tool among large, richly valued technology companies for giving employees liquidity while staying private for longer, avoiding the disclosure requirements and quarterly scrutiny that come with a stock-market listing. Anthropic, OpenAI's closest rival, faces a similar calculus over the timing of its own eventual listing.
Because the new tender priced OpenAI at the same $852 billion mark set in March, rather than a higher figure, the sale offers a rare data point on how investors are valuing the company between funding rounds, at a time when AI valuations broadly have drawn scrutiny over spending levels and circular investment arrangements among AI companies, chipmakers and cloud providers.
OpenAI's next test will be whether it can sustain that valuation as it continues to spend heavily on compute and data-center commitments, and whether the confidential SEC filing eventually converts into a public roadshow or is shelved in favor of further private tenders.
