OpenAI Replaces CRO After 9 Months, Hires Wiz Alum

OpenAI has once again changed its Chief Revenue Officer. Dennis Dresser is stepping down after just nine months in the role, and Dali Rajic, who served as president and COO of cloud security firm Wiz, has been brought in as the new CRO. Wiz was acquired by Google for $32 billion earlier this year in Google's largest-ever acquisition.

Co-founder and President Greg Brockman announced the change in a blog post. He credited Dresser for "leading the revenue organization through a formative period for the company and working to build the team up to its current level." He added, "The way AI is being deployed is changing rapidly, and Rajic will turn what we've learned into a repeatable operating system."

The CRO change is not an isolated event. OpenAI's senior leadership has been visibly thinning out over the past month. On August 11, COO Brad Lightcap announced his resignation after four years in the role. He joined the company in 2018, served as CFO for four years, and had been COO since 2022. Before that, Fidji Simo, CEO of AGI deployment and the company's second-highest-ranking executive, left in July. Sora lead Bill Peebles and VP of Science Kevin Weil have also departed recently. Brockman's expanded role at the top of the company traces back to Simo's departure.

OpenAI says its products reach more than 1 billion weekly active users and 2 million business customers. But even as the company has scaled, executives have reportedly acknowledged — both privately and publicly — that revenue targets have not all been met. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI's blog post originally included language emphasizing a "relentless focus" on "measurable business outcomes," but that phrase was absent from the version actually published. This aligns with a shift this year in which CEO Sam Altman has made enterprise customer acquisition a company priority while scaling back technical experimentation not tied to that goal.

OpenAI has confirmed it confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC, though the timing of any listing remains unclear. It is common for private companies to reshuffle their executive lineup ahead of a public listing, and this week OpenAI bought back an additional $7 billion worth of employee-held shares at an $852 billion valuation. The funds came from the $122 billion funding round closed in March, and the buyback gives employees a way to cash out equity — a move some read as a signal that an IPO could come later than expected. With the revenue leadership change, a string of executive departures, and IPO preparations all happening at once, OpenAI appears to be shifting from a phase of rapid scale-up to one focused on strengthening execution.