In a blog post on Tuesday, Openai announced it has acquired product testing startup Statsig and agreed to introduce founder and CEO Vijaye Raji as CTO for its applications.
Openai paid Statsig $1.1 billion, one of the biggest acquisitions ever for the ChatGpt maker, and under its current $300 billion valuation, Openai spokesman Kayla Wood told TechCrunch.
The acquisition marks Openai’s latest efforts to build an application business led by Fidji Simo, former CEO of Instacart, who started working for the company a few weeks ago. Raji reports to SIMO and will lead the company’s AI coding tool Codex, and product engineering for ChatGpt, a future application that Openai plans to build. The company says that providing Statsig’s experimental platform in-house will accelerate product development across the application organization.
When Raji joins, Openai makes changes to its leadership team.
Kevin Weil, the company’s chief product officer, became vice president of a new group called Openai for Science, announced in a LinkedIn post. Weil says his new organization’s goal is to “build the next great scientific instrument: an AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery.” Weil says he will work closely with Sebastien Bubeck, a researcher at Openai and former VP of Microsoft’s AI.
“Openai’s product and design leaders are amazing and we can do this as Fidji Simo is now starting his role as CEO of the application,” says Weil. “Openai products have been my life since I joined, but they are in great hands.”
Meanwhile, Openai’s current engineering dean Srinivas Narayanan announced in a LinkedIn post that he will move into a new role as CTO for the B2B application company. In this role, Narayanan says he will work directly with Brad LightCap, the Openai COO who oversees many of the many relationships with the company’s customers.
Openai said the acquisition of StatSig is pending regulatory review. Once completed, the company says all Statsig employees will become Openai employees. However, product testing startups “continue to operate independently and continue to serve their customer base from the Seattle office,” the company said in a blog post.
