In the early hours of Tuesday, OpenAI revealed that it had paid $1.1 billion to purchase Statsig, a product development business, by continuing its spending spree.
Though under the company’s current $300 billion valuation, OpenAI is paying $1.1 billion for Statsig in an all-stock deal, making it one of the largest acquisitions ever for the ChatGPT maker, according to OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood, who spoke to the media representative about this acquisition.
Statsig assists OpenAI and other businesses with feature testing and real-time data utilisation. Vijaye Raji, the founder and CEO of Statsig, is joining OpenAI as the CTO, the technical leader for the applications division and as part of the acquisition of the product testing startup. He will answer to Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart who was appointed in May to head OpenAI’s applications division, the purchase represents the company’s most recent attempt to expand its Applications division.
Raji will oversee product engineering for ChatGPT, Codex, the company’s AI coding tool, and upcoming apps that OpenAI intends to develop. He will answer to Simo. Bringing Statsig’s experimental platform in-house, according to the business, will speed up product development within the Applications division.
Raji wrote in a LinkedIn post that building AI-powered experiences at scale for people and businesses with the amazing team at OpenAI is a unique and significant opportunity. He went on to say that it’s even more special when we do that with the tools we built at Statsig.
As the leadership team of OpenAI is changing with Raji joining the company, OpenAI, claims that Statsig will keep running on its own and providing customer service from its Seattle location. Regulatory approval and other normal closing requirements still apply to the purchase.
In a statement, Simo added, “Vijaye has an impressive track record of developing new consumer and B2B products and systems at scale.”
Lately, OpenAI has been making large purchases, using some of the substantial sum of money it has amassed and the skyrocketing value of its stock to support expansion into new markets. Its most notable event occurred in May, when OpenAI paid nearly $6.5 billion for the all-equity acquisition of Jony Ive’s AI devices startup IO, solidifying the company’s hardware position. Before that, in 2024, OpenAI paid an unknown amount to purchase the analytics database startup Rockset.
Google ended up hiring the startup’s co-founder as part of a $2.4 billion license arrangement after OpenAI’s $3 billion deal for getting AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf fell through earlier this year.
Raji said in a statement that working with Statsig has been incredibly been fulfilling, bringing me to this point and ensuring that we will keep assisting teams in delivering better software every day.
Kevin Weil, the company’s chief product officer, revealed on LinkedIn that he will be joining a new division called OpenAI for Science as vice president. “Building the next great scientific instrument: an AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery” is Weil’s stated objective for his new organisation. Weil states that he will collaborate closely with Sebastien Bubeck, a researcher with OpenAI and a former Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and Vice President of AI.
“OpenAI’s product and design leaders are incredible, and Fidji Simo starting her role as CEO of Applications is a great addition to the team,” Weil said. “Since she had joined, OpenAI’s products have been her life, and they’re in excellent and capable hands.”
In a LinkedIn post, Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI’s current head of engineering, revealed that he will be moving to a new position as the company’s CTO of B2B apps. Narayanan claims that he will work closely with Brad Lightcap, the COO of OpenAI, who is in charge of many of the business’s connections with enterprise clients.
According to OpenAI, regulatory approval is still waiting for the Statsig acquisition. All Statsig workers will become OpenAI employees after it is finished, according to the company. But according to the company’s blog post, the product testing startup will “continue operating independently and serving its customer base out of its Seattle office.”
Statsig will keep investing in its core products and offering its services, according to Raji. Also with Statsig, it will provide OpenAI with a platform that already has clients including Bloomberg, Atlassian, Notion, and Brex. Another client is OpenAI. Statsig will be used in conjunction with OpenAI’s API Platform and ChatGPT Business and Enterprise plans.
OpenAI is on its way in developing an ecosystem and application stack that can enhance and expand ChatGPT. While OpenAI is also considering the consumer market, Anthropic is mainly concerned with the corporate. It will be crucial to develop applications and ecosystems for long-term viability as LLM capabilities all converge to be sufficient.
Moving forward in the acquisition, acquiring Statsig is a significant step in expanding the range of applications that OpenAI offers.
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