OpenAI is pushing to go public by September, a timeline that would make it one of the fastest paths from AI darling to publicly traded company in recent memory.

The company expects to file confidentially with the SEC over the summer, setting the stage for what could be the most consequential tech IPO since Arm Holdings listed in 2023.

From nonprofit origins to $80B+ valuation

The company’s valuation roughly tripled in under a year, jumping from approximately $29 billion in 2023 to somewhere between $80 billion and $90 billion by February 2024 following a secondary share sale.

Microsoft has poured over $10 billion into OpenAI since 2019, a bet that has reshaped both companies. For Microsoft, it meant Copilot integrations across its product suite. For OpenAI, it meant the compute power and financial runway to stay ahead of Google, Anthropic, and a growing list of well-funded competitors.

OpenAI’s corporate structure is genuinely unusual. It operates as a capped-profit subsidiary under the control of the OpenAI Nonprofit. In English, that means there’s a ceiling on how much investors can earn relative to their initial investment, with excess profits flowing back to the nonprofit’s mission.

The IPO landscape and SpaceX’s shadow

Arm’s September 2023 IPO showed that public markets were willing to pay premium multiples for companies positioned at the intersection of chips and AI workloads. OpenAI’s listing would test whether that same enthusiasm extends to pure-play AI software companies with massive revenue growth but equally massive compute costs.

The market is also watching SpaceX’s expected filing closely. A SpaceX IPO would suck up enormous amounts of institutional capital and media attention. OpenAI targeting September suggests the company wants to move fast, potentially getting ahead of or alongside that wave rather than being drowned by it.

If successful, the listing is expected to catalyze further AI-related IPOs. The pipeline of private AI companies sitting on lofty valuations is long, and many are watching OpenAI’s reception as a signal for their own timelines.

What this means for crypto and AI tokens

OpenAI doesn’t have a token. It has never issued one, and there’s no indication it plans to. But that hasn’t stopped the crypto market from treating major OpenAI milestones as trading catalysts.

AI-focused tokens like FET, AGIX, RNDR, AKT, and GRT have historically shown sympathy trading around big AI announcements.

For investors watching the broader landscape, the OpenAI IPO is a litmus test for AI valuations across both traditional and crypto markets. If OpenAI prices at or above its $80-90 billion secondary market valuation and trades well, it validates the thesis that we’re still in the early innings of AI monetization.

The capped-profit structure adds a wrinkle worth monitoring. Public market investors typically want maximum upside exposure, and OpenAI’s nonprofit governance creates a constraint that doesn’t exist at peers like Anthropic or Mistral. How the company navigates that tension in its S-1 filing, and how institutional allocators respond, will set the tone for AI investing in the second half of 2024 and beyond.