OpenAI is kicking off the new year with another acquisition. The company is acquiring the team at Convogo, a business software developer that helps executive coaches, consultants, and HR professionals automate and improve leadership assessment and feedback reporting.
OpenAI is kicking off the new year with another acquisition. The company is acquiring the team at Convogo, a business software developer that helps executive coaches, consultants, and HR professionals automate and improve leadership assessment and feedback reporting.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company is not buying Convogo's intellectual property or technology, but is hiring a team to work on its "cloud-based AI initiatives," TechCrunch reports .
Three co-founders — Matt Cooper, Evan Kater and Mike Gillette — will join OpenAI in what a source familiar with the matter called a stock sale deal. But the Convogo product will be phased out.
The startup was born as a “weekend hackathon,” the brainchild of Cooper’s mother, a professional executive coach. Her question was simple: Could AI automate routine reporting tasks so she could spend more time engaging with clients? Over the past two years, Convogo has helped “thousands” of coaches and partnered with “the world’s leading leadership development firms,” according to an email from the company about the sale of the business.
In their letter, the team noted that the main problem they identified during their work was how to bridge the gap between the capabilities of each new model and their translation into real-world results.
“We’re now more convinced than ever that the key to bridging this gap lies in thoughtful, purposeful experiences like the one we’ve created for coaches at Convogo,” the founders wrote. “That’s why we’re excited to join OpenAI to continue our work to make AI accessible and useful for professionals in every industry.”
Convogo is OpenAI’s ninth acquisition this year, according to PitchBook. In almost all of these cases, the product was either integrated into the OpenAI ecosystem — like Sky , an AI interface for Mac, or Statsig , a product testing firm — or was completely closed when the team joined OpenAI, as in the cases of Roi, Context.ai, and Crossing Minds.
The Convogo deal also signals that OpenAI, like its competitors, is using mergers and acquisitions as an accelerator for talent and opportunity. The major exception to this rule is OpenAI's acquisition of Jonny Ive's IO Products, which continues its product roadmap as the two companies work together to build AI hardware.
