OpenAI acquisition of Statsig
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The OpenAI acquisition of Statsig was an all-stock deal, valued at roughly $1.1 billion, that OpenAI announced on September 2, 2025. Statsig is a Seattle-area company that builds product experimentation and feature management software. As part of the deal, Statsig founder and chief executive Vijaye Raji joined OpenAI as Chief Technology Officer of Applications, reporting to Applications chief executive Fidji Simo. OpenAI presented the move both as a talent and technology acquisition and as one piece of a wider reorganization of the team that ships its consumer and business products [1][2][3].
The purchase landed during a year when OpenAI made several large acquisitions while it raced to turn research into shipping products. OpenAI was already a Statsig customer, so the company was buying tooling it already used in production [3][4][5].
Statsig is a platform for running controlled experiments on software products and for managing how features are rolled out. Vijaye Raji founded it in 2021 after leaving Meta, where he had been a senior engineering leader and had spent more than a decade working on Facebook products, including a stint running the company's Seattle-area engineering office and leading its gaming and entertainment groups. Before Meta he spent close to a decade at Microsoft. He has described Statsig as an attempt to package the kind of experimentation discipline that large technology companies build in-house and to sell it to teams that cannot afford to build their own [4][6][7].
The core of the product is A/B testing. A team splits its users into groups, shows each group a different version of a feature, and measures which version moves the metrics the team cares about. Around that core, Statsig sells feature flags, which let engineers turn features on or off for specific users without shipping new code, and product analytics, which track how people actually use an application. The platform also offers session replay and real-time dashboards, what the company calls real-time decisioning. The pitch is that a single system can decide whether to launch something, control the rollout, and then measure the result [3][4][6].
By the time of the acquisition, Statsig had a customer list that included Notion, Microsoft, Brex, Atlassian, Figma, Bloomberg, and Flipkart, along with OpenAI itself. The company employed roughly 150 people and was based in the Seattle area [4][5][8].
OpenAI and Statsig described the transaction as an all-stock deal, meaning Statsig shareholders received OpenAI equity rather than cash. Multiple outlets reported the value at approximately $1.1 billion, which matched Statsig's most recent private valuation. CNBC noted that the figure sat under OpenAI's own valuation, which was around $300 billion at the time [1][2][4][5].
The $1.1 billion price was the same number Statsig had reached only a few months earlier. In May 2025 the company raised $100 million in a Series C round led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Madrona, at a $1.1 billion valuation. Reporting around that round put Statsig's annual recurring revenue near $40 million [8][9][10].
The table below summarizes the headline terms as reported.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Acquirer | OpenAI |
| Target | Statsig |
| Announcement date | September 2, 2025 |
| Deal value | Approximately $1.1 billion |
| Structure | All-stock |
| Founder and CEO | Vijaye Raji |
| New role for founder | CTO of Applications at OpenAI |
| Reports to | Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications |
| Statsig headquarters | Seattle area (Bellevue, Washington) |
| Statsig founded | 2021 |
| Employees | About 150 |
| Product focus | A/B testing, feature flags, product analytics |
| Last private valuation | $1.1 billion (May 2025 Series C, led by ICONIQ Growth) |
OpenAI said the deal was subject to regulatory review and customary closing conditions. Once it closed, all Statsig employees would become OpenAI employees, while the platform would keep running for its existing customers out of its Seattle office [1][2][3].
The acquisition was tied to a set of leadership moves inside OpenAI's product organization. Vijaye Raji became Chief Technology Officer of Applications. In that role he reports to Fidji Simo, who runs OpenAI's Applications group as its chief executive. OpenAI said Raji would lead product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex, the company's AI coding tool, along with future applications, and that his remit would span core systems including infrastructure and the Integrity team [1][2][3].
Fidji Simo had joined OpenAI earlier in 2025 from the grocery delivery company Instacart, where she had been chief executive. Before that she had run the Facebook app at Meta. Her appointment as CEO of Applications was announced in May 2025, and she reports to Sam Altman. The Applications group covers the products OpenAI builds on top of its research, as opposed to the research itself [1][2][11].
OpenAI announced other changes alongside Raji's appointment. Srinivas Narayanan, previously the company's head of engineering, moved into a role as CTO of B2B Applications, focused on products sold to businesses. Kevin Weil, who had been OpenAI's chief product officer, shifted to lead a new group called OpenAI for Science, described as an effort to build an AI platform that speeds up scientific discovery. Taken together, the moves split product and engineering leadership across consumer applications, business applications, and a separate science push [2][3][12].
The structure is worth reading carefully because the title CTO of Applications is narrower than a company-wide CTO role. Raji's mandate sits inside the Applications group under Simo rather than across all of OpenAI's research and infrastructure. The split reflects how OpenAI had grown into distinct organizations for frontier research and for the products built on top of that research [2][3].
The strategic logic that OpenAI and reporters described is straightforward. OpenAI ships ChatGPT and a growing set of other applications to a very large user base, and it changes those products often. Deciding which changes help and which hurt is exactly the problem that experimentation tooling exists to solve. A platform that can run A/B tests, gate features behind flags, and measure usage in real time lets a product team move faster while keeping some discipline about what actually works. OpenAI said bringing the platform in-house would speed up product development across the Applications organization [1][3][4].
Because OpenAI was already a Statsig customer, the acquisition brought in a team that understood how OpenAI ran its own experiments, plus the underlying technology. Buying the company also secured Raji as a product and engineering leader at a moment when OpenAI was building out its Applications organization. Several reports framed the deal as much about the people and the leadership role as about the software [4][5].
There is a plain commercial angle as well. Experimentation at OpenAI's scale generates a large volume of measurement data, and owning the platform rather than renting it gives the company more control over how that infrastructure runs and evolves. That kind of control matters more as the products get larger and the cost of running them grows [3][4].
The Statsig deal was one of several acquisitions OpenAI pursued in 2025 as it spent heavily to expand beyond research. Earlier in the year, in May 2025, OpenAI agreed to acquire io, the AI hardware startup co-founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive, in an all-stock deal that reporting valued at roughly $6.5 billion. That deal pointed at consumer hardware [13].
OpenAI's attempt to acquire the AI coding company Windsurf, formerly Codeium, did not close. Reporting indicated that the roughly $3 billion deal fell apart in July 2025 and that Google then brought on Windsurf's chief executive and several co-founders in a hiring arrangement, while the rest of the Windsurf business was later acquired by Cognition. Set against that backdrop, the Statsig purchase reads as a smaller, cleaner deal that closed with a defined leadership outcome [12][14].
The pattern across these moves was a company using its equity and its fundraising momentum to buy talent and tooling that supported shipping products quickly, rather than only funding internal research. The Statsig deal fit that pattern on the product-development side, io on the hardware side, and the failed Windsurf talks on the developer-tools side [5][13].
For OpenAI, the clearest result of the deal was organizational. It installed a new CTO of Applications with a background in product experimentation, and it slotted that role into a reshaped leadership structure under Fidji Simo. For the broader market, the acquisition was read as a sign that experimentation and feature-management tooling had become core infrastructure for AI product companies, not a nice-to-have [3][4][5].
For Statsig's customers, the immediate message was continuity. OpenAI said Statsig would keep operating and serving its existing customers from its Seattle office, with a measured approach to any future integration. Raji's own note framed it the same way, that the team would carry its mission forward inside OpenAI while keeping the product running. That framing left open longer-term questions about how an independent experimentation vendor owned by one large AI company would relate to customers who compete with that owner, but in the near term the stated plan was to keep the lights on for the existing base [3][4][15].