OpenAI Acquires Statsig for $1.1 Billion, Names Vijaye Raji CTO of Applications

OpenAI has appointed Vijaye Raji as its new chief technology officer of applications, reporting to Fidji Simo, CEO of applications, following the acquisition of experimentation platform Statsig for $1.1 billion. 

Raji will lead product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex, overseeing infrastructure, core systems and Integrity. He previously founded and served as the CEO of Statsig and spent a decade leading large-scale consumer engineering at Meta.

“Vijaye has a remarkable record of building new consumer and B2B products and systems at scale. He’s joining at a time when our models are opening entirely new ways to build, and his leadership will help turn that progress into safe applications that empower people,” Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, said.

Statsig provides A/B testing, feature flagging and real-time decisioning, and has been used by OpenAI in its product development. The platform will continue to operate independently from its Seattle office, with employees transitioning to OpenAI once the acquisition closes.

“Joining OpenAI as CTO of applications is an extraordinary opportunity to bring my experience scaling consumer and enterprise products to a mission I deeply believe in: advancing AI in ways that are capable of solving hard problems, reliable, and truly beneficial to people everywhere,” Raji said.

OpenAI also announced a shuffle of several other executive positions across the company.

Srinivas Narayanan, who previously led OpenAI’s Applied Engineering team, will take on a new role as CTO of B2B applications. “I am excited to focus my energy on figuring out how to make AI useful for solving challenging and economically important tasks for all business applications, including for startups, enterprises, and governments,” Narayanan said.

Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, announced a new initiative called OpenAI for Science, aimed at building an AI-powered platform to accelerate scientific discovery. “We want to prove that AI models are ready to accelerate fundamental science,” Weil said. “Scientific discovery improves everything from the quality of our daily lives to national security to global GDP.”