Featured image by AFP/Getty Images
Retail investors won’t have to wait until OpenAI’s IPO.
As part of its historic funding round that now totals $122 billion, the company said that for the first time, it will offer some of its shares in several ETFs managed by Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest.
The upcoming monster IPOs of companies like OpenAI and SpaceX have revived ongoing criticism that retail investors have long been kept out of some of biggest technology successes as VC-backed companies remain private longer.
“This announcement is a direct response to the private market’s tension between enormous investor appetite for top startups and very limited supply,” said Emily Zheng, a senior research analyst at PitchBook. “The approach is deliberately selective. By routing individual participation through banks and ARK’s funds rather than directly onto the cap table, OpenAI can say yes to a wide range of investors without the complexity and administrative overhead.”
OpenAI’s move is the latest in a series of developments aimed at giving public investors access to private companies. Robinhood debuted its closed-end Ventures Fund I on the New York Stock Exchange, offering exposure to private companies such as Databricks, Stripe and ElevenLabs.
After an initial bumpy debut, Robinhood’s fund is trading only slightly above its list price of $25, closing this most recent day of trading at around $26.50 a share.
That said, OpenAI also sold about $3 billion in shares recently to the wealthy individual clients of three “very large banks,” Axios reported. And despite the company’s warning last year, some individuals have likely been able to nab a slice of OpenAI through special purpose vehicles.
And in a nod to the growing discourse about AI’s potential winners and losers, the company said the offering will give “more people the opportunity to share in the upside economics of OpenAI and the AI era.”
Learn about our editorial standards.
