OpenAI says it has agreed to buy product-testing startup Statsig for $1.1 billion, the company’s latest mega-purchase in a continued revamp of its bread-and-butter applications business.
The all-stock deal, disclosed Tuesday, is notable as much for talent acquisition as it is for utilizing Statsig’s experimentation platform within OpenAI to accelerate product development. Statsig CEO Vijaye Raji will join OpenAI as chief technology officer, where he will lead product engineering for ChatGPT, Codex, and future apps. Former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo was named to head the applications business in May.
“Working with the incredible team at OpenAI to build AI-powered experiences at scale for people and businesses is a rare and meaningful opportunity,” Raji wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Doing that with the help of tools we built at Statsig makes it even more special.”
“Vijaye has a remarkable record of building new consumer and B2B products and systems at scale,” Simo said in a statement.
As part of the app division rebuild, OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil, will become vice president of a new group called OpenAI for Science, he said on LinkedIn this week. Srinivas Narayanan, head of engineering at OpenAI, said on LinkedIn that he will move to a new role as CTO of the company’s B2B applications.
The organizational shakeup is a small piece of significant changes being undertaken by the creators of ChatGPT.
OpenAI has been on an acquisition tear of late. In May, it pulled off its biggest purchase, $6.5 billion, for io, Apple legend Jony Ive’s AI devices startup. OpenAI also planned to scoop up Windsurf, an AI-assisted coding tool, for $3 billion. But that deal never happened, and Alphabet Inc.’s Google ended up bagging that company’s co-founder as part of a $2.4 billion licensing deal.
Last year, OpenAI snagged analytics database company Rockset for an undisclosed sum. OpenAI also expressed an interest in buying Chrome from Google and make it an “AI-first experience,” Nick Turley, head of product for ChatGPT, testified during the remedy phase of Google’s antitrust trial in April.
But Chrome is not for sale: A federal judge this week ruled that Google did not need to divest its popular web browser, which is used by more than 3 billion people.
