Eightco Holdings (ORBS), a Nasdaq-listed company backed by Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee, is deepening its wager on OpenAI. The company said Friday it had made a extra $40 million dedication, taking its total stake to $90 million.
Eightco (NASDAQ: ORBS) Invests Extra $40 Million into OpenAI, Bringing Total OpenAI Funding to $90 Millionhttps://t.co/0oJC0E71gx pic.twitter.com/5MKbhM6k7K
— Eightco Holdings, Inc. (@Eightcoholdings) March 20, 2026
The stake now makes up about 30% of Eightco’s total treasury. The company also backs Beast Industries, the media project led by YouTube creator MrBeast.
Eightco CEO Kevin O’Donnell known as the OpenAI investment “a transformative alternative” for every the company and its shareholders, adding that it gives retail investors entry to one among the realm’s most essential AI corporations.
“This investment highlights our persisted perception in the lengthy-time duration affect of synthetic intelligence and positions ORBS on the forefront of innovation as this abilities reshapes industries globally,” O’Donnell acknowledged.
OpenAI recently closed a anecdote $110 billion private funding round, with participation from Amazon, NVIDIA, and a team of sovereign wealth funds. That round pushed its implied valuation to $730 billion.
The company surpassed $20 billion in annual income as of January 2026, greater than tripling the roughly $6 billion it generated in 2024.
Eightco’s investment became disclosed alongside two board-stage appointments.
Lee will join Eightco’s board of administrators, whereas Brett Winton, chief futurist at Cathie Wooden’s ARK Invest, has been named an advisor to the board.
To boot as to its OpenAI region, Eightco maintains holdings of 277 million WLD, 11,068 ETH, and $76 million in money and stablecoins.
The WLD region makes Eightco by a ways the supreme publicly traded holder in the Worldcoin ecosystem, a digital identification and crypto project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The token has lost roughly 97% of its price from an all-time high of $11.7, per CoinGecko.
ORBS shares fell 4% to $0.90 intraday, in step with Yahoo Finance, and are down about 46% year-to-date. The decline comes no topic a surge in trading volumes following loads of funding bulletins.
OpenAI readies IPO
OpenAI is making ready for a doable IPO as early because the fourth quarter, whereas sharpening its point of curiosity on project mutter and high-productivity expend cases for ChatGPT.
At a contemporary all-hands meeting, Applications CEO Fidji Simo advised staff the company is “orienting aggressively” in the direction of commercial expend, aiming to seriously change its 900 million weekly customers into extra intensive, high-compute customers.
The company is also constructing out its finance crew and refining spending plans, targeting about $600 billion in compute investment by 2030 alongside projected income of greater than $280 billion.
Disclosure: This text became edited by Vivian Nguyen. For added records on how we invent and review stutter, look our Editorial Protection.
