Sam Altman has a proposition for startup founders: AI tokens for equity

Sam Altman's Token Offer Is a New Twist to Startup Investing - Business Insider

Sam Altman said that OpenAI will offer Y Combinator's current batch an equity-for-tokens deal.

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2026-05-20T18:27:56.113Z

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The pilot program will be available for spring and summer 2026 batches of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, according to a person familiar with the offering.

A mic drop moment @ycombinator tonight@sama just offered $2M in OpenAI tokens to EVERY YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity

Just like Yuri Milner offering to invest in every startup back when Sam was a YC partner

I can't wait to see what's unlocked when you… pic.twitter.com/5KlRA2lNGj

— Tyler Bosmeny (@bosmeny) May 20, 2026

The person familiar with the offering said that participating startups will sign an uncapped Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE, agreement. That means OpenAI's eventual ownership stake would be determined in a future financing round, rather than being fixed upfront.

The SAFE will not include a Most Favored Nation, or MFN, provision, the person said. In other words, if a startup later issues another SAFE with better terms, OpenAI would not automatically receive those terms. By contrast, the $375,000 uncapped SAFE in Y Combinator's standard deal does include an MFN provision.

The accelerator's startups often already score steep token discounts. The partners do, too; Ankit Gupta wrote on X that "one of the clutch perks of being a partner at YC is having unlimited budget to spend on tokens."

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Not all were fans of the deal. Investor and "All-In" cohost Jason Calacanis told founders to "be careful," warning that OpenAI could one day incorporate a startup's idea into their own product. Y Combinator did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Roshan Kumaraswamy, who founded the YC-backed startup Apten, responded to Calacanis: "The startups are buying openai tokens anyways..."

Altman's deal is a twist on traditional investing — and yet another sign of how AI is changing startup economics.

Tokens are a measurement of computing that help determine bills for AI usage, such as operating an AI coding agent or processing a chatbot conversation. While many new companies are now running with leaner teams, they're racking up high token bills in the process.

Y Combinator incentivized this change. In a recent episode of the accelerator's "Startup School" series, partner Diana Hu advised founders to embrace tokenmaxxing over headcountmaxxing.(Translation: spend your budget on AI tokens, not new employees.)

Altman himself has a long history of funding startups, especially through Y Combinator. He served as the accelerator's president from 2014 to 2019.

Some of Altman's investments came up during his trial with Elon Musk. His stake in Helion Energy, for example, was worth more than $1.6 billion as of the end of 2025.

The Y Combinator deal will run through OpenAI, rather than Altman personally, per his X post.

Henry Chandonnet

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