Case study · North America
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.
What to look for in a deal like this
- The scale: very large tenders require institutional buyers, so the transaction doubles as a test of private-market appetite.
- Which share class or instrument is actually being sold, which at structurally unusual companies may not be ordinary equity.
- Whether the price was set by a concurrent primary round or independently.
Frequently asked
Are employees at the largest AI companies actually able to sell?
Increasingly yes, through company-organised tenders — but participation is capped and permissioned, and the window opens when the company decides. It is not a market.
Does a large tender make a company's valuation more credible?
It shows that buyers exist at that price for that size, which is more evidence than a primary round from a single investor provides. It is still one price, set in one process, at one moment.
Compare this with the other North America deals in thecase-study index, or readwhy secondary sales happen for the motivation behind each deal shape. The glossary defines the terms used above.