OpenAI announced in a blog post on Tuesday that it agreed to acquire the product testing startup, Statsig, and bring on its founder and CEO, Vijaye Raji, as the company’s Chief Technology Officer of Applications.
OpenAI is paying $1.1 billion for Statsig in an all-stock deal — one of the largest acquisitions ever for the ChatGPT maker — under the company’s current $300 billion valuation, OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told TechCrunch.
The acquisition marks OpenAI’s latest effort to build out its Applications business, helmed by the former CEO of Instacart, Fidji Simo, who started work at the company a few weeks ago. Raji will report to Simo and will head product engineering for ChatGPT, the company’s AI coding tool Codex, and future applications that OpenAI plans to build.
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The company says that bringing Statsig’s experimentation platform in-house will accelerate product development across the Applications organization.
As Raji comes on board, OpenAI is making changes to its leadership team.
The company’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, will become VP of a new group called OpenAI for Science, he announced in a post on LinkedIn. Weil says the goal of his new organization “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, an OpenAI researcher and the Former VP of AI and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft.
“I’m able to do this because the product and design leaders at OpenAI are amazing, and now are complemented by Fidji Simo beginning her role as CEO of Applications,” said Weil. “OpenAI’s products have been my life since I joined, and they’re in great hands.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s current head of engineering, Srinivas Narayanan, announced in a post on LinkedIn that he would transition to a new role as the company’s CTO of B2B Applications. In the role, Narayanan says he will collaborate directly with OpenAI’s COO, Brad Lightcap, who oversees many of the company’s relationships with enterprise customers.
OpenAI says the Statsig acquisition is pending regulatory review. Once completed, the company says that all Statsig employees will become OpenAI employees. However, the product testing startup will “continue operating independently and serving its customer base out of its Seattle office,” the company said in a blog post.
This deal draws a notable parallel with Meta’s recent acquisition of Scale AI and the onboarding of its founder, Alexander Wang, into a key leadership role. In Meta’s case, the move was not only about acquiring advanced data-labeling and AI scaling technology but also about securing the vision and leadership of a founder who had built infrastructure critical for AI development.
Meta positioned itself to accelerate its AI ambitions by absorbing both the company and its leadership talent. With its Reality Labs bleeding billions, Zuckerberg appears to be shifting Meta’s core bet toward AI, betting that breakthroughs in LLMs, autonomous agents, and eventually artificial general intelligence (AGI) will define the next era of computing.
Scale AI, now a major partner, provides the data infrastructure necessary to train such systems. Wang, its founder, launched Scale at 19 and turned it into a key supplier of high-quality datasets to firms like OpenAI, Nvidia, and the US government. His move to Meta, insiders say, gives the company deep bench strength in both talent and tools.
OpenAI’s $1.1 billion purchase of Statsig mirrors this approach: it is less about acquiring a product alone and more about embedding the strategic mind behind it — Vijaye Raji — into its leadership core.
Analysts believe that this reflects a growing pattern in the AI sector, where acquisitions are increasingly doubling as leadership and talent pipelines. The integration of founders directly into high-level roles ensures that their product philosophies and technical expertise do not just get absorbed into the larger company but also actively shape its future direction.