Prime Highlight:
- OpenAI will acquire Convogo’s founding team to strengthen its AI cloud projects, without taking over the startup’s product or intellectual property.
- The move reflects OpenAI’s strategy of using acqui-hires to gain talent and accelerate product development.
Key Facts:
- The deal involves founders Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett joining OpenAI under an all-stock agreement, while Convogo winds down operations.
- This marks OpenAI’s ninth acquisition in the past year, mostly focused on absorbing teams rather than their existing products.
Background:
OpenAI will acquire the team behind Convogo, a business software startup that built tools to support executive coaches and HR teams. However, the company will not take over Convogo’s product or intellectual property. Instead, it will bring the three founders into OpenAI to work on its AI cloud initiatives.
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that the deal is an acqui-hire and said the founders, Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett, will join the company under an all-stock agreement. Following the move, Convogo will wind down its operations and stop offering its product.
Convogo began as a weekend project sparked by a simple idea. Cooper’s mother, who works as an executive coach, asked whether artificial intelligence could handle the time-consuming work of writing reports, so coaches could focus on people rather than paperwork. Over two years, the startup grew quickly and supported thousands of coaches, while also partnering with major leadership development firms.
In an email sent to users, the founders said their biggest lesson was how hard it is to turn new AI model capabilities into tools that deliver real results for professionals. They said purpose-built experiences are the key to closing this gap and added that joining OpenAI will allow them to continue this mission at a much larger scale.
The Convogo acqui-hire marks OpenAI’s ninth acquisition in the past year, based on PitchBook data. In most of these deals, OpenAI either absorbed the product into its own platform or closed it down after bringing the team in-house. Previous examples include Roi, Context.ai, and Crossing Minds.
The deal underlines how OpenAI is using mergers and acquisitions mainly to gain talent and speed up product development. The only recent exception is its acquisition of Jonny Ive’s io Products, which continues to build AI hardware as part of a longer-term product plan.