Privately held start-up OpenAI is allowing its employees to sell $1.5 billion U.S. worth of company stock to Japan’s SoftBank.
The deal allows SoftBank, a holding company based in Tokyo, to get a bigger stake in OpenAI, one of the world’s leading developers of generative artificial intelligence (A.I.).
At the same time, current and former OpenAI employees will be able to cash out their shares before the company goes public, which is still expected to be years away.
Employees of OpenAI will have until Dec. 24 to decide if they want to participate in the tender offer to SoftBank, which will pay $210 U.S. per share for the OpenAI stock.
The deal is reportedly the result of SoftBank chief executive officer (CEO) Masayoshi Son wanting a larger stake in OpenAI after putting $500 million U.S. into the company’s last funding round.
The tender offer is not related to OpenAI’s plans to restructure into a for-profit business.
SoftBank has been investing heavily in A.I. companies in recent years. SoftBank was an early investor in British microchip firm Arm Holdings (ARM) and has also invested in Apple (AAPL) and Alibaba (BABA).
SoftBank currently has about $160 billion U.S. of assets under management.
OpenAI’s valuation has risen to $157 billion U.S. in the two years since it launched the ChatGPT A.I. chatbot. OpenAI has raised $13 billion U.S. from Microsoft (MSFT), its biggest investor.
In October of this year, OpenAI launched a search feature within ChatGPT that positions the company to compete against search engines such as Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google.
SoftBank’s stock trades in Japan under the ticker symbol “TYO: 9984.”
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