OpenAI has sold 6.6 billion dollars in shares held by current and former employees, according to a new report. This sale pushed the company’s total valuation to 500 billion dollars, which is the highest ever achieved by a privately held company. Purchasers in the sale included SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, MGX, and T. Rowe Price.
The transaction was not a conventional funding round because the cash went to individuals holding shares or options in OpenAI rather than into the company’s own treasury. It is still considered a powerful retention tool for the company, which has faced significant pressure from Meta’s revitalized AI lab. This summer, Meta poached at least seven top engineers from OpenAI, often luring them away with multi-million dollar signing bonuses.
OpenAI’s most recent funding round occurred in August, when it completed a 40 billion dollar fundraise at a 300 billion dollar valuation. SoftBank, Thrive, T. Rowe Price, and Dragoneer were also investors in that earlier round, along with private equity firms like Blackstone and TPG and major venture capitalists like Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz.
The share sale also highlights OpenAI’s ability to raise cash as needed, which is a particularly important resource given the company’s ambitious infrastructure plans. OpenAI has committed to spending 300 billion dollars on Oracle Cloud Services over the next five years, a sum that vastly outstrips its current revenue or reserves. The powerful momentum of the company’s fundraising suggests this is not as outlandish as it may seem. In September, Nvidia announced a plan to invest 100 billion dollars in OpenAI as part of a strategic infrastructure partnership.
This new sale comes just weeks after a non-binding agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft, which many saw as paving the way for OpenAI’s conversion into a for-profit entity. However, the conversion has not yet been confirmed in court, and the new sales could cause significant complications if the conversion fails to proceed as planned.
OpenAI continues to develop and launch products at a blistering pace, releasing its latest Sora 2 video model and an accompanying social media feed earlier this week. The company reported 4.3 billion dollars in revenue in the first half of 2025, while burning through 2.5 billion dollars in cash.