OpenAI explores secondary stock sale for employee liquidity at $500 B valuation
Thrive Capital and others may buy billions in employee-held shares
Transaction boosts valuation from $300 B to roughly $500 B paper worth
Aims to improve retention amid heavy recruitment by Meta and rivals
OpenAI is exploring a secondary stock sale that would allow current and former employees to cash out at an implied valuation of roughly $500 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Existing investors, including Thrive Capital, have approached the AI giant about purchasing employee-held shares in a deal expected to raise billions of dollars. If completed, the transaction would boost OpenAI’s paper valuation by nearly two-thirds from the $300 billion set in its last major funding round, a $40 billion syndicate led by SoftBank Group Corp.
The move comes as OpenAI seeks to reward employees and counter aggressive recruitment efforts by competitors such as Meta Platforms Inc, which has recently enticed researchers with nine-figure compensation packages. By offering a path to liquidity at an elevated valuation, OpenAI aims to improve retention at a time when several research staff have departed for rival “superintelligence” initiatives.
News of the proposed secondary sale follows last week’s announcement that OpenAI secured an additional $8.3 billion in an oversubscribed tranche of its $40 billion financing. Demand for the earlier round outstripped supply by approximately five times, underlining investors’ eagerness to back the company ahead of schedule.
Product Pipeline & Market Position
Behind ChatGPT’s surge to an expected 700 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March, OpenAI is prepping the release of GPT‑5 and has already rolled out open-weight reasoning models to rival China’s DeepSeek. It also inked a nearly $6.5 billion all-stock deal to acquire Jony Ive’s AI-hardware start-up, signalling a push into physical devices.
Separately, OpenAI remains in protracted talks over its structure as a for-profit company. Microsoft Corp, which has invested roughly $13.75 billion and holds rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property, is reportedly the main holdout, seeking to preserve its technology access through 2030 and negotiate the size of its stake in any newly configured entity.
