The news: OpenAI is acquiring product testing startup Statsig for $1.1 billion and building out its applications division.
- Statsig CEO Vijaye Raji, formerly vice president and head of entertainment at Facebook, will join OpenAI as CTO of Applications.
- The deal, pending regulatory approval, would support the development of “even better, more responsive experiences for the people and businesses we serve,” per OpenAI.
Why it matters: The acquisition hints at an interest in moving beyond models into full-fledged apps, which could possibly include social, productivity, and enterprise tools.
- Statsig’s A/B testing tools can enable fast, data-driven feature experimentation and safe rollouts, crucial for building reliable and user-friendly AI products. This could help accelerate app development and deployment for OpenAI.
- It could also strengthen OpenAI’s support for developers and companies building on its APIs and lay the foundation for an AI app development platform, similar to what Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing.
Our first take: This deal positions OpenAI to launch new social experiences—as previously hinted at by CEO Sam Altman—such as a personalized content feed or social AI collaboration that rivals Meta’s AI app.
The move could position OpenAI as not just a technology provider, but also the owner of an AI app ecosystem. OpenAI is trying to own the stack, from core models to a new generation of intelligent, user-facing applications.
This is our immediate perspective. We’re actively developing this story throughout the day with more research and data from the EMARKETER database. Our in-depth analysis will be included in our client-only Briefings. Non-clients can click here to get a demo of our full platform and coverage.
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