During a Y Combinator event on Tuesday night, Sam Altman had what YC partner Tyler Bosmeny called a “mic drop moment.” Altman offered $2 million worth of OpenAI tokens to every startup in the current class in exchange for equity in the startup.
In other words, he promised that OpenAI would invest in the whole class, not with cash but with an allotment of AI tokens that startups can use to build their products.
i am excited to see what will happen with tokenmaxxing startups, both for how they work internally and the products they can build.openai offered to invest $2M in tokens into every startup in the current yc batch.happy building! https://t.co/YSHYJoutuf— Sam Altman (@sama) May 20, 2026
Y Combinator has about 169 startups in this cohort, according to its directory.
As for how much equity each startup can expect to give up, that can’t be determined at the time it signs the deal. It will depend on how much the startup is worth when it raises its first priced round — a funding round in which investors assign the company a formal valuation.
Y Combinator Managing Director Jared Friedman tells TechCrunch that the deal will be offered as an “uncapped SAFE,” meaning, “it will convert in the next priced round, which is typically the Series A,” he said.
A SAFE is YC’s standard agreement structure for its early-stage companies that raise money before their first “priced” rounds with valuations involved. An uncapped SAFE doesn’t set a ceiling on that valuation, which can benefit founders because the higher the valuation at conversion, the smaller the slice of the company the investor receives.
We’ve seen some discussion on X that this deal could amount to OpenAI holding about 2% equity should a startup hit a $100M valuation, though without seeing the actual terms, we can’t verify that.
For OpenAI, the deal works on two levels. Obviously, it gains equity in this crop of early-stage companies, meaning it profits if they succeed. But it also encourages them to build their business on and with OpenAI. Whether this locks them in for the long term or not, it does mean that they won’t default to OpenAI’s comp …