In mid-August, OpenAI announced a new chief revenue officer—its fifth C-suite shakeup in the past year, but arguably its most important as the company sprints toward what could be an historic IPO, likely in 2027.
The company said that Dali Rajic, the president and COO at Google-owned cybersecurity company Wiz, would replace Denise Dresser as CRO. Dresser held the role for less than a year, leaving many to wonder what happened, and why OpenAI chose Rajic.
Rajic, 53, has earned a reputation as one of the most disciplined, successful enterprise sales leaders in tech. OpenAI being able to recruit him was a “coup,” one source with ties to OpenAI rival Anthropic tells Fortune. OpenAI now has more revenue from enterprises than consumers, a milestone it hit earlier than planned, CNBC reports. The team is working aggressively to capture market share from Anthropic, which is reportedly planning to IPO as soon as September, meaning it will likely beat OpenAI to the public markets.
“If OpenAI is behind on enterprise, he is definitely the guy,” says Jyoti Bansal, who hired Rajic in 2012 to lead sales for AppDynamics, the application performance management platform Bansal cofounded and ran. Rajic then worked his way up to become CRO, and was a key part of the team pitching AppDynamics to investors for a possible IPO. The company almost went public in March 2017 before Cisco swooped in the day before the planned market debut and purchased it for $3.7 billion.
