Tom Lee-backed Eightco doubles down on OpenAI as total stake hits $90 million

Eightco Holdings (ORBS), a Nasdaq-listed company backed by Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee, is deepening its bet on OpenAI. The company said Friday it had made an additional $40 million commitment, taking its total stake to $90 million.

Eightco (NASDAQ: ORBS) Invests Additional $40 Million into OpenAI, Bringing Total OpenAI Investment 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 enterprise led by YouTube creator MrBeast.

Eightco CEO Kevin O’Donnell called the OpenAI investment “a transformative opportunity” for both the company and its shareholders, adding that it gives retail investors access to one of the world’s most important AI companies.

“This investment highlights our continued belief in the long-term impact of artificial intelligence and positions ORBS at the forefront of innovation as this technology reshapes industries globally,” O’Donnell stated.

OpenAI recently closed a record $110 billion private funding round, with participation from Amazon, NVIDIA, and a group of sovereign wealth funds. That round pushed its implied valuation to $730 billion.

The company surpassed $20 billion in annual revenue as of January 2026, more than tripling the roughly $6 billion it generated in 2024.

Eightco’s investment was disclosed alongside two board-level appointments.

Lee will join Eightco’s board of directors, while Brett Winton, chief futurist at Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, has been named an advisor to the board.

In addition to its OpenAI position, Eightco maintains holdings of 277 million WLD, 11,068 ETH, and $76 million in cash and stablecoins.

The WLD position makes Eightco by far the largest publicly traded holder in the Worldcoin ecosystem, a digital identity and crypto project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The token has lost approximately 97% of its value from an all-time high of $11.7, per CoinGecko.

ORBS shares fell 4% to $0.90 intraday, according to Yahoo Finance, and are down about 46% year-to-date. The decline comes despite a surge in trading volumes following multiple funding announcements.

OpenAI readies IPO

OpenAI is preparing for a potential IPO as early as the fourth quarter, while sharpening its focus on enterprise growth and high-productivity use cases for ChatGPT.

At a recent all-hands meeting, Applications CEO Fidji Simo told employees the company is “orienting aggressively” toward business use, aiming to convert its 900 million weekly users into more intensive, high-compute customers.

The company is also building out its finance team and refining spending plans, targeting about $600 billion in compute investment by 2030 alongside projected revenue of more than $280 billion.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.