On June 8, OpenAI confirmed it had confidentially submitted a draft of its IPO paperwork to the SEC. In August, chief financial officer Sarah Friar told employees the company will be public in 2027, possibly sooner. That's where the OpenAI IPO stands in September 2026: the process has formally started, no date has been set, and there is still no way to buy OpenAI stock in a regular brokerage account.
A lot has changed since spring. OpenAI raised $122 billion in March, its revenue run rate has roughly doubled since the end of 2025, and it still burns cash at a pace few companies have ever tried to take public. Here's where the IPO actually stands, the imperfect ways to get exposure today, and how to approach the stock once it lists.
Where the OpenAI IPO Stands Right Now
An S-1 is the registration statement a company files with the SEC before it sells shares to the public. It's the document that eventually lays out the full financials, the risks, and who controls what. Filing a draft confidentially lets the SEC review it privately, so a company can start the process without locking in a date or showing its books to competitors. The public version has to come out at least 15 days before the roadshow, the stretch where executives pitch the offering to big investors.
That's also why there's no OpenAI stock ticker yet. The symbol, the exchange, and the price range will all show up in the public S-1, and OpenAI hasn't released one. Any OpenAI stock price you see quoted online today comes from private secondary trades or derivative products, not a listed share.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are reportedly leading the deal. In April, CNBC reported that OpenAI had discussed going public as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026, and earlier reports put the potential raise around $60 billion at a valuation above $1 trillion. That would rank among the largest IPOs ever, a list SpaceX topped with its June debut.
So what's a realistic OpenAI IPO date? Friar's August message makes 2027 the base case. The restructuring that once stood in the way is finished: in October 2025, OpenAI became a for-profit public benefit corporation, a company legally required to weigh a stated mission alongside profits, still controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. OpenAI isn't short on cash after March, though it does have a $35 billion reason to go public eventually. That much of Amazon's $50 billion commitment only comes through if OpenAI lists or reaches a milestone tied to artificial general intelligence.
Its closest rival may get there first. Anthropic confidentially filed on June 1, and reports point to a listing as soon as October. We track that race in our guide to buying Anthropic stock.
What OpenAI Is Worth and What It Costs to Run
OpenAI's current price tag was set on March 31, when it closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation. Amazon committed $50 billion, Nvidia and SoftBank put in $30 billion each, and about $3 billion came from individual investors who bought in through JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, triple the $1 billion OpenAI had planned to raise that way. In August, current and former employees sold about $7 billion of stock at the same valuation.
Revenue is the bull case. Bloomberg reported in August that OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate, meaning its current monthly revenue multiplied by 12, topped $40 billion. That's roughly double where it ended 2025. President Greg Brockman told staff the run rate grew more than 20% in July alone, helped by coding tools, subscriptions, and a young advertising business.
Costs are the bear case. Training and running AI models takes enormous computing power, and OpenAI commits to much of it years in advance. Projections reported by The Information earlier this year had OpenAI burning roughly $25 billion in cash in 2026 and $57 billion in 2027, and not turning cash-flow positive until 2030.
Put those together and you get the valuation question. At $1 trillion, IPO buyers would be paying about 25 times OpenAI's annualized revenue for a company that isn't expected to generate cash for years. The competition isn't standing still either: Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI all sell AI models to the same businesses and consumers. And OpenAI is still controlled by its nonprofit parent, so the public S-1 will be the first real look at how much say outside shareholders get after the IPO.
How to Invest in OpenAI Before It Goes Public
You can't buy OpenAI shares on a public exchange today, so every option before the IPO is a proxy with trade-offs.
Microsoft (MSFT) is the largest outside shareholder. After the October 2025 restructuring, it owned roughly 27% of OpenAI, a stake valued at about $135 billion at the time, and the March round diluted that somewhat. Even undiluted, 27% of $852 billion is about $230 billion, which is only around 6% of Microsoft's $3.7 trillion market value. Buy Microsoft and you're mostly buying Azure, Office, and Windows. The relationship has also loosened: in April, Microsoft gave up its exclusive license to OpenAI's models, and OpenAI's revenue-share payments to Microsoft are now capped through 2030.
Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) began trading on the NYSE in March and bought $75 million of OpenAI common stock in April, alongside stakes in private companies like Databricks, Stripe, and Revolut. There's no minimum, no accreditation requirement, and no performance fee.
Destiny Tech100 (DXYZ) holds about three dozen private tech companies. OpenAI is a small slice, about 2.1% of the portfolio in a recent filing, though the fund has since put $150 million into an OpenAI-linked vehicle. It charges a 2.5% annual management fee.
ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) is an interval fund, meaning you can buy in on any business day but can only sell during periodic buyback windows. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic together made up more than 26% of its value in late May. Individuals can buy it through SoFi, and expenses run about 2.9% a year.
The catch with RVI and DXYZ is that they're closed-end funds. Their share prices move with demand rather than with the value of what they own, known as net asset value, or NAV. In May, DXYZ traded at $61.66 a share while its holdings were worth $24.56 a share, a 151% premium. Pay a premium like that and you can lose money even if OpenAI does well.
If you're an accredited investor, which generally means $200,000 in annual income ($300,000 with a spouse) or $1 million in net worth not counting your home, platforms like Forge, Hiive, and EquityZen sometimes offer OpenAI exposure. Expect high minimums and layered fees. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires the company's approval, so most of these deals run through special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, which are pooled entities that hold shares on buyers' behalf.
One more warning: skip anything sold as "OpenAI tokens." When Robinhood gave European customers tokenized OpenAI exposure in 2025, OpenAI said publicly that the tokens were not OpenAI equity and that it had not approved any transfer.
How to Buy OpenAI Stock When It Lists
Once the public S-1 is out, buying in gets much more ordinary. A few steps put you in position:
- Fund a brokerage account before the roadshow starts. For SpaceX's IPO, retail orders ran through Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, SoFi, and E*TRADE, and requests closed the day before trading began.
- Request IPO shares if your broker offers them. Friar told CNBC in April that OpenAI will set aside IPO shares for individual investors, though she didn't say how many. SpaceX reserved about 30% of its offering for retail. With demand like this, expect to receive fewer shares than you ask for, or none.
- Read the public S-1 for the OpenAI stock ticker, the price range, the share classes, and the latest losses.
- Use limit orders if you buy on day one. A limit order fills only at your price or better. A market order fills at whatever the price is when it executes, which is how people end up paying the day's high.
SpaceX shows why that last step matters. It sold shares at $135 in its IPO, opened at $150 on June 12, and closed its first day at $160.95. It hit $225.64 in the week after the IPO, then fell by roughly half from that peak by late July. In mid-September it trades around $151. An investor who got IPO shares is up about 12%. Someone who bought at the peak is down about 33%.
A calmer approach is to set your total budget ahead of time and buy in pieces over several weeks or months, the same idea behind dollar-cost averaging into an index fund. New listings can also get a second wave of selling when the lockup period ends, usually about 180 days after the IPO, when insiders are finally allowed to sell their shares.
Then size it honestly. A company expected to burn tens of billions of dollars a year belongs in the speculative slice of a portfolio, not the core. If watching an OpenAI position fall by half within weeks, as SpaceX did, would push you to sell, the position is too big. The OpenAI IPO will be a landmark either way. That doesn't make the stock a safe bet on the first day or the hundredth.
Figures from company statements and reporting by CNBC, Bloomberg, and The Information, as of mid-September 2026. IPO timing can change quickly, so check for a public S-1 before acting on anything here.