OpenAI has once again made a major strategic move in the AI industry with its acquisition of Seattle-based product testing startup Statsig in a $1.1 billion all-stock deal.
In addition to the deal that allows Statsig to continue operating independently from its Seattle-based office, the startup’s founder and CEO, Vijaye Raji, will be joining OpenAI as the newly created Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Applications.
Founded in 2021, Statsig is now a leading platform for product development and experimentation that provides tools to help companies run A/B tests, manages features flags, and analyzes real-time product data.
“Vijaye and his team founded Statsig on the belief that the best products come from rapid experimentation, tight feedback loops, and data-informed decision-making,” OpenAI said in a blog post.
With its powerful capabilities, Statsig enables rapid, data-driven product improvements that are crucial for the evolving demands of AI systems where even minor changes can significantly impact performance and user experience.
“The Statsig platform has already played a central role in how we ship and learn quickly,” the ChatGPT maker said. “Bringing it in-house will strengthen our ability to accelerate experimentation across our Applications org and build even better, more responsive experiences for the people and businesses we serve.”
For large AI platforms such as ChatGPT, this capability is essential as they serve hundreds of millions of users and require frequent updates to stay competitive and reliable.
“Joining OpenAI as CTO of Applications is an extraordinary opportunity to bring my experience scaling consumer and enterprise products to a mission I deeply believe in: advancing AI in ways that are capable of solving hard problems, reliable, and truly beneficial to people everywhere,” Raji said. “The journey with Statsig has been deeply gratifying, leading me to this moment and giving me conviction that we will continue helping teams ship better software every day.”
OpenAI has been on an aggressive acquisition path in 2025, especially with how it has been using its roughly $500 billion stock valuation to expand its AI ecosystem. Prior to acquiring Statsig, OpenAI also made a loud acquisition of Jony Ive’s AI device startup, io, for $6.4 billion.
As such, the acquisition of Statsig complements OpenAI’s strategic expansion by strengthening the company’s hardware and software experimentation, as well as its feature management capabilities.
This acquisition is one of the largest in the ChatGPT maker’s history and it reflects the company’s commitment to accelerating the development of its AI products. It highlights the critical role of experimentation infrastructure in AI product development, as product development and experiment platforms like Statsig allow companies to safely test new features, avoid regression, and continuously improve services at scale.
Also complementing this acquisition is the tech giant’s recent partnership with Broadcom for the production of custom AI chips which is set to start by 2026. These strategic moves highlight OpenAI’s expansive vision to build a comprehensive AI ecosystem that can serve itself and one that spans research, applications, and hardware.
This ensures that its AI platforms and products continue evolving swiftly in response to user needs and technological advancements, as well as continue leading the AI arms race.
