OpenAI delayed its IPO. That makes private investors happy

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said on Tuesday that his AI behemoth would delay its initial public offering while it figures out the whole “destroying humanity” possibility.

Of course, Altman didn’t say it like that. He just said his company wouldn’t race towards going public until it can “make confident safety decisions.”

And OpenAI isn’t the only company hitting pause on going public. Oura, the maker of those health tracking rings, is also delaying its IPO. These businesses will have to turn elsewhere to raise money, because they need a lot of money just to stay alive.

OpenAI had a loss of $39 billion in 2025. So, if it’s not getting that money from going into the stock market, the company will need to get it from the same place it has been getting its money all along.

“Normally with a startup company, venture capital would be the source of financing,” said Jay Ritter, director of The IPO Initiative at the University of Florida.

But OpenAI isn’t a normal startup. Venture capital doesn’t cut it.

“They’ve also been raising money from major tech firms, from sovereign wealth funds, and from mutual funds,” Ritter said.

And then there are hedge funds, super-wealthy families, university endowments, and pensions — a lot of the same types of investors who would buy stock in a company after its IPO. These days, they’re getting in earlier and earlier.

“The rationale is pretty simple,” said Greg Martin, co-founder of Rainmaker Securities. “I’d rather invest in SpaceX at a $50 billion valuation than have to wait until it’s at a $1.75 trillion valuation in the public markets.”

Rainmaker Securities helps companies do exactly what Martin described; it connects private companies with funding that is not the stock market. Martin said more startups are staying private longer and longer — and getting bigger and bigger.

“That has been a real dramatic shift over the last 30 years,” he said. “But even in the last five years, we’ve really seen a lot of these big private companies stay private at valuations that we would have never seen before.”

Investors love this practice because they can make more money. The company is fine with it because it doesn’t have to constantly report to shareholders. But there’s still nothing quite like going public.

“The stock market has a lot more liquidity in it,” said Sarah Kunst, managing director at Cleo Capital, a venture capital firm. “A lot more money than even all of the richest people on the planet wanting to make private investments.”