OpenAI is making one of its largest bets yet with a $1.1 billion all-stock acquisition of Statsig, a product experimentation startup whose 150 employees and platform will now fold into its fast-growing applications division.
As part of the deal, Statsig founder Vijaye Raji has been named OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer of Applications, where he will oversee product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex.
“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 in a blog post on Sept. 2.
The applications team now has both a CTO and a CEO
Before founding Statsig, Raji worked in large-scale consumer engineering at Meta. At OpenAI, he will report to Applications CEO Fidji Simo, who joined OpenAI in May after serving as Instacart’s chief executive.
“Vijaye has a remarkable record of building new consumer and B2B products and systems at scale,” Simo said in the blog post. “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 with many new tools to improve their lives, help companies increase their impact and allow developers to build faster and better products.”
Why Statsig became OpenAI’s biggest purchase yet
Statsig is a product experimentation platform based in Washington state that provides A/B testing, feature flagging, and real-time decisioning. OpenAI was a customer before the acquisition, making the purchase both strategic and operational.
While Statsig will continue to operate independently from its Seattle office, all 150 Statsig employees will become OpenAI employees as part of the deal. That influx of talent and technology underscores the central role the applications division plays in OpenAI’s long-term growth strategy.
OpenAI is staffing up its applications division as it balances rapid commercial growth with its unusual hybrid corporate structure, which combines a capped-profit company with a nonprofit parent. In May, OpenAI’s founder and CEO Sam Altman released a memo saying the nonprofit would stay focused on “positive impact,” while Simo would lead “traditional” business functions under the applications team.
The applications team is “responsible for how our research reaches and benefits the world,” Altman wrote. It oversees ChatGPT, which reached 700 million weekly active users and 5 million paying business users in August.
OpenAI’s expansion pits it against Alphabet — whose Google Gemini AI app drew more than 450 million monthly active users in July — as well as Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek, and other AI firms.
Behind the surge in AI adoption lies a mounting concern about affordability. The cost of AI is rising as prompts take more tokens, threatening to price out some small startups.
