← All companies
OpenAI
Maker of ChatGPT, GPT-5, Sora and the OpenAI API. After the 2025 restructuring into a public-benefit corporation, employee PPUs were converted to equity-like profit shares with vesting and tender mechanics aligned to standard private-company practice. Largest private AI company in the world.
Reviewed May 10, 2026 (6d ago)
Current estimate
4 methods · May 10, 2026High confidence (67%)
$521.1B
range $367.9B – $674.2B
Implied per-share: $352.1 · vs last primary +4%
Last primary round
$500B
Strategic / Secondary tender · 7mo ago
Secondary signal
$533.0B
Forge · 2026-04+7%
Headcount
5,500
employees · LinkedIn+72%
Revenue (est.)
$15.0B
annual run rate
Complete company data
Every input we use, where we got it from, and how much we trust it.
| Field | Value | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company fundamentals | |||
| Sector | AI | high | |
| Headquarters | 🇺🇸 United States | high | |
| Founded | 2015 | high | |
| Website | openai.com | high | |
| Latest primary round | |||
| Post-money valuation | $500B | high | |
| Round name | Strategic / Secondary tender | high | |
| Date | 2025-10-15 (7 months ago) | high | |
| Lead investor | Thrive Capital / Internal | high | |
| Amount raised | $6.6B | medium | |
| Capitalization | |||
| Total fully-diluted shares | 1,480M | low | |
| Implied share price (latest primary) | $352 | medium | |
| Primary equity type granted | PPU | high | |
| Financials | |||
| Annual revenue (est.) | $15,000M | medium | |
| EV / Revenue (implied) | 33.3x | medium | |
| Headcount | |||
| Employees (now) | 5,500 | medium | |
| Employees (12 months ago) | 3,200 | medium | |
| 12-month headcount growth | +72% | medium | |
| Methodology inputs | |||
| Sector ETF proxy | BOTZ | medium | |
| ETF annual return (trailing 3-yr) | 32% | medium | |
Funding history
Primary rounds reported in Bloomberg, WSJ, TechCrunch, Reuters, or SEC Form D filings (efts.sec.gov). Linked per round below.
Secondary tender2025-10-15
$500.0BLed by Thrive Capital · raised $6.6B
Source: Bloomberg / WSJ Oct 2025
Series G2025-03-31
$300.0BLed by SoftBank · raised $40.0B
Source: Reuters Mar 2025
Series F2024-10-02
$157.0BLed by Thrive Capital · raised $6.6B
Source: WSJ Oct 2024
Strategic2023-01-10
$29.0BLed by Microsoft · raised $10.0B
Source: Bloomberg Jan 2023
Series C2021-01-01
$14.0BLed by Microsoft · raised $1.0B
Source: TechCrunch
Secondary market signals
Secondary market signals: bid/ask/trade indications from Hiive (hiive.com), Forge Global, Caplight Index, and tender prices reported in the press.
| Date | Type | Source | Price / share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-22 | trade | Forge | $360 |
| 2026-02-10 | trade | Hiive | $348 |
| 2025-12-05 | bid | Forge | $320 |
View live indications: Hiive ↗ · SEC Form D filings ↗
Public peer comparables
Public peer comparables: editorial selection of public companies with the closest business model. EV/Revenue and growth from public 10-Q filings and Bloomberg, refreshed quarterly.
| Ticker | Company | EV / Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| NVDA | Nvidia | 22x |
| PLTR | Palantir | 55x |
| CRWD | CrowdStrike | 18x |
| MDB | MongoDB | 11x |
| NET | Cloudflare | 14x |
Confidence breakdown
How much we trust each of the four valuation methods for this specific company, and why.
Method A — Peer-multiple
weight 35%→ $344.9B75% confidence
Growth-weighted peer EV/Revenue: 25.5x → 10% private-company discount → 23.0x on $15000M revenue
Method B — Secondary-implied
weight 25%→ $514.5B55% confidence
Recency-weighted average of 3 secondary indications (180-day decay)
Method C — Primary time-decay
weight 30%→ $692.9B73% confidence
$500B round (2025-10-15) × 1.59× growth × 0.97× multiple decay over 0.6 years — capped at 1.3× recent secondary ($533.0B → $692.9B)
Method D — Sector momentum
weight 10%→ $588.2B51% confidence
$500B × (1 + 32% p.j.)^0.6yr = $588.2B via BOTZ ETF-proxy
Overall confidence
67%
Weighted average of the four methods. Above 65% is high, 40–65% medium, below 40% low.
Worked example for an employee
A concrete walk-through using a hypothetical employee profile. Same engine the calculator uses — try it with your real numbers.
Profile: a hypothetical employee who joined OpenAI 24 months ago (2024-05-16) with 2,000 units, on the standard 4-year vesting schedule with a 1-year cliff.
Vesting
1,000 of 2,000
50% vested at month 24
Implied share price (mid)
$352
weighted average of 4 methods
Gross vested value
$352,065
vested shares × implied price
Net value
$352,065
no strike, gross = net
Tax (rough)
$93,598
US federal only · AMT risk: low
What if the next round is…
Up round +30%
$397,987
New round at +30% valuation, 15% new shares issued
Down round −30%
$205,371
New round at −30% valuation, 20% new shares (higher dilution in distress)
Secondary today
$299,255
Sale on the secondary market at the typical 15% discount to the mid estimate
These numbers come from the same engine as the live calculator. Walk through with your own grant: use your real numbers →
Transparent assumptions
What we assumed where exact data isn't available. If any of these don't match your situation, the numbers above will be off.
Fully-diluted share count
1480M shares
We don't have authoritative cap-table access for private companies. The number above is reconstructed from SEC Form D filings, secondary-market price-vs-valuation math, and leaked share-class summaries. Actual fully-diluted count (including unvested option pool and SAFEs) may differ by 5–15%.
Common-stock waterfall
1.0× to common
We assume a clean common-stock outcome — i.e. preferred-share liquidation preferences and ratchets do not extract value before common. In a down-exit, this assumption can be very wrong: preferred stack can take 30–70% of proceeds.
Private-company illiquidity discount
10% off public peers
Applied to Method A (peer-multiple). Per-company because category leaders with deep secondary markets and a clear IPO path warrant a smaller discount than early-stage names. The literature range is 10–35%; for OpenAI we use 10% based on secondary-market depth, valuation history, and proximity to liquidity.
Revenue growth assumption (Method C)
120% YoY
Compounded forward from the last primary date to today to estimate the company's value drift. Set per-company based on disclosed or reported ARR trajectory. Method C is further capped at 1.3× the most recent secondary trade (if any) to stop runaway extrapolation when revenue growth outpaces what the market is actually paying.
Sector ETF momentum (Method D)
BOTZ @ 32%/year
Method D applies the trailing return of BOTZ as a market-proxy adjustment to the primary valuation. Crude — meant as a tiebreaker when peer and secondary data conflict, not as a primary signal.
Outlier auto-downweight
Methods >50% from median get ½ weight
Robust-statistics safety net: any method whose output strays more than 50% from the median of the other three methods has its confidence weight halved when computing the blended mid-point. Prevents a single bad extrapolation from dragging the headline.
Recency decay for secondary trades
180-day half-life (e⁻ᵈ/¹⁸⁰)
A trade from 30 days ago counts ~5× more than one from 180 days ago. Tunable; some platforms use shorter half-lives.
Tax estimate
US federal only, single filer
Uses 2024 US federal brackets, ignoring state tax, NIIT, AMT credit recovery, and any other deductions. Treat as a directional sanity check, not a tax bill.
All data from public sources. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Not affiliated with OpenAI. Last refreshed manually — see methodology for our update cadence.