OpenAI: liquidity at a scale the industry hadn't seen

The situation

By late 2025, OpenAI's valuation had climbed to roughly $500 billion in its latest funding round — one of the highest valuations any private company has reached — while an IPO remained years away by the company's own public timeline. Employees who had joined years earlier were sitting on enormous paper wealth with no way to convert any of it to cash.

How the deal worked

OpenAI ran a tender offer in October 2025 that facilitated approximately $6.6 billion in employee share sales, priced off the $500 billion valuation. More than 600 employees participated, and roughly 75 of them hit the tender's maximum individual sell limit of $30 million each — meaning a meaningful share of the total came from a relatively small group of the most senior or longest- tenured sellers.

The outcome

At roughly $6.6 billion, the tender is among the largest single employee liquidity events any private company has run, reflecting both OpenAI's scale and how large equity grants at frontier AI labs have become. It gave employees a real, if partial, path to liquidity without forcing the company toward a near-term IPO it has said it isn't planning.

What it teaches

The size of a tender offer scales with the size of the company and the depth of paper wealth built up in its cap table — and the AI sector's valuations in this cycle have pushed those numbers into territory no previous generation of pre-IPO tech companies reached. Seeemployee & founder liquidity for how an individual tender allocation typically works, and compare withAnthropic's tender, run six months later at a lower relative participation rate.