OpenAI is kicking off the new year with another acqui-hire. The AI giant is acquiring the team behind Convogo, a business software platform that helps executive coaches, consultants, talent leaders, and HR teams automate and improve leadership assessments and feedback reporting. An OpenAI spokesperson clarified that the company is not acquiring Convogo’s intellectual property or technology, but rather hiring the team to work on its AI cloud efforts. The three co-founders, Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett, will join OpenAI as part of an all-stock deal. Convogo’s product will be wound down.
The startup began as a weekend hackathon inspired by a question from co-founder Matt Cooper’s mother, who is an executive coach. She wondered if an AI tool could automate the tedious work of report writing, freeing her to focus on the human coaching work she loves. Over the past two years, Convogo has helped thousands of coaches and partnered with the world’s top leadership development firms.
In an email announcing the acquisition, the Convogo team explained that the core problem they uncovered was how to bridge the gap between the possibilities of each new AI model and translating that into real-world outcomes. The founders wrote that they are convinced the key to bridging that gap lies in thoughtful, purpose-built experiences, like the one they built for coaches. They expressed excitement about joining OpenAI to continue their work of making AI accessible and useful to professionals in every industry.
This Convogo acqui-hire marks OpenAI’s ninth acquisition in the span of a year. In nearly all of those acquisitions, the acquired product was either folded into OpenAI’s ecosystem or completely shut down as the team joined the company. The deal signals that OpenAI, like its competitors, is using mergers and acquisitions as a talent and capability accelerator. A main exception to this pattern was OpenAI’s acquisition of Jony Ive’s company, which continues its product roadmap as the two companies collaborate on AI hardware.