OpenAI is allowing employees to sell about $1.5 billion worth of stock in a new tender offer to SoftBank, CNBC has learned.

The new financing will give the Japanese tech group a bigger slice of the artificial intelligence startup and allow current and former OpenAI employees to cash out their shares, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC.

Employees have until Dec. 24 to decide whether to participate in the new tender offer, which has not been previously reported, one of the people said. The deal was pushed by SoftBank’s billionaire founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, who insisted on a larger stake in the startup after investing $500 million in OpenAI’s last round of funding, one of the people said.

The tender offer is unrelated to OpenAI’s potential plans to restructure the company as a for-profit business, one of the people said.

OpenAI and SoftBank declined to comment.

The deal, which is being made through SoftBank’s Vision 2 fund, highlights Son’s interest in the field of artificial intelligence and backing the most valuable private companies, according to people familiar with the matter. SoftBank is an early investor in semiconductor company Arm, and Son said at a conference in October that he is preparing “tens of billions of dollars” to “take the next big step” in artificial intelligence. He has previously invested in Apple, Qualcomm and Alibaba.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 recently invested in artificial intelligence startups Glean, Perplexity and Poolside. SoftBank has about 470 portfolio companies and $160 billion in assets across its two Vision Funds.

A person close to Son told CNBC that the investment in OpenAI fits SoftBank’s enthusiasm for deploying cash and adopting a capital-intensive business model.

Even without SoftBank’s deep pockets, OpenAI can easily raise billions of dollars in cash. In the two years since launching ChatGPT, its valuation has climbed to $157 billion. OpenAI has raised about $13 billion from Microsoft and completed its latest $6.6 billion round of financing in October, led by Thrive Capital and followed by chipmaker Nvidia, SoftBank and other companies.

The company also received a $4 billion revolving credit line, bringing its total liquidity to more than $10 billion. CNBC confirmed to a person familiar with the matter in September that OpenAI expects revenue of $3.7 billion this year and losses of about $5 billion.

OpenAI employees can cash out

The tender offer will be for current and former employees who received restricted stock units at least two years ago and held them for at least two years, a person familiar with the matter said. The price of $210 per share will be consistent with the company’s most recent round of financing.

Against the backdrop of a sluggish IPO market and soaring company valuations, tender offers are crucial for technology employees. Private companies rely on such transactions to keep employees happy and ease the pressure of going public. Since OpenAI won’t be going public anytime soon and its price is too expensive for potential acquirers, secondary stock sales are the only way for shareholders to get some of their paper wealth in the near future.

Databricks is another private company that raised money to allow employees to cash out and avoid the pressure of the public markets, CNBC reported on Tuesday.

OpenAI has taken a stricter approach to tender offers in the past, with the company setting rules to determine who can participate in stock sales, CNBC reported in June. Current and former OpenAI employees previously told CNBC that concerns about access to liquidity grew after reports that the company had the right to claw back vested shares.

But the company changed its policy on secondary sales of stock in June and now allows current and former employees to participate equally in the annual stock tender offer.

The company expects to allow more of these secondary sales and will need to tap the private markets again in the future depending on investor demand and the capital-intensive nature of its business, according to a person familiar with the new tender offer.

OpenAI faces increasing competition from startups like Anthropic and tech giants like Google. Revenue in the generative AI market is expected to exceed $1 trillion within a decade, according to new data from Menlo Ventures, and corporate spending on generative AI has surged 500% this year.

In October, OpenAI launched a search feature in its popular chatbot ChatGPT, enabling the powerful AI startup to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Perplexity.

Watch: Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital says OpenAI is the definitive consumer brand in AI right now
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