OpenAI completed a $7 billion secondary share sale, allowing current and former employees to cash out equity at an $852 billion valuation, CNBC confirmed Monday. This marks the third major secondary offering since the company closed its record $122 billion primary funding round in March — following a $6.6 billion tender at $500B in October 2025 and a $1.5 billion offer in 2024.
The sale provides liquidity to employees ahead of OpenAI's potential IPO. The company confidentially filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC in June but has not disclosed a timeline for going public. The secondary mechanism has become a standard component of OpenAI's pre-IPO strategy, giving shareholders partial exit optionality without a full public market debut.
For practitioners, these successive secondaries signal two things: the pace of internal valuation growth (jumping from $500B to $852B in nine months) and the mounting pressure to provide employee liquidity as the company scales toward IPO readiness. Rival Anthropic is similarly gearing up for a potential public exit.