OpenAI said today it’s buying Statsig Inc. in a $1.1 billion deal that’s just as much of an acquihire as it is about bringing the product testing startup’s technology into its fold.

As part of the deal, Statsig founder and Chief Executive Vijaye Raji (pictured), who previously worked as a software engineer at Meta Platforms Inc., will join OpenAI as its new chief technology officer of applications, a new role for the company. He will report directly to OpenAI’s CEO of Applications Fidji Simo, who joined the company from Instacart earlier this year.

“As part of this transition, we’re acquiring Statsig, one of the most trusted experimentation platforms in the industry — powering A/B testing, feature flagging, and real-time decisioning for some of the world’s most innovative companies, including OpenAI,” the company said in an announcement.

The $1.1 billion price tag matches the valuation of Statsig following its most recent $100 million funding round in May. Because there’s no premium being paid, that suggests Statsig and its investors are confident that OpenAI itself will continue to grow its value. The deal needs regulatory approval to proceed, but that’s expected to be a formality.

Once the deal closes, Statsig will continue to operate as an independent entity at its Seattle-based headquarters, serving its existing customers, which include OpenAI. Statsig’s employees will be given the option to transition to OpenAI if they wish.

Founded in 2021, Statsig helps customers including OpenAI to test new software features with select groups of users and gather feedback so companies can decide if they need to tweak anything, roll it out as it is, or cancel the new feature completely. The startup counts 155 employees on its books, and after its latest funding round said it plans to grow its team to around 200 by the end of 2026. It’s not clear if it’s still planning to do so.

Raji has previously made headlines for implementing what is a relatively unusual policy these days of insisting that all staff work at the company’s office five days per week. By prohibiting remote work, he claims to have created a culture that fosters greater collaboration, speed and innovation. “Working with the incredible team at OpenAI to build AI-powered experiences at scale for people and businesses is a rare and meaningful opportunity,” Raji wrote in a blog post. “Doing that with the help of tools we built at Statsig makes it even more special.”

There’s a growing trend among not only enterprises but also software vendors to snap up anyone who’s considered as a “hot AI talent”, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. Meta Platforms Inc. ignited the trend in June, when it made a string of moves in quick succession to secure the services of former Scale AI Inc. CEO Alexandr Wang, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and then Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross.

“Google has also made moves to bring aboard more AI talent, and now OpenAI is playing the same game,” Mueller said. “Hiring or acqui-hiring talent is the way to go now, and this is how OpenAI’s purchase of Statsig will be seen. But Statsig also provides some valuable capabilities in the area of A/B testing which should be useful, and that points to the growing ambitions of OpenAI in the consumer space.”

S. “Soma” Somasegar, managing director of Madrona Ventures and an early investor in Statsig, said in his own blog post that the startup is a natural fit for OpenAI because of its “world-class product velocity” and its obsession with helping customers. He added that Statsig’s data-driven approach has helped it to become one of the leading intelligent application design companies, and believes that OpenAI will help it to “extend its impact while keeping its mission front and center.”

OpenAI recently closed on its own, much bigger fundraising in March, which saw it collect $40 billion from investors, bringing its valuation to a sky-high $300 billion. The artificial intelligence giant wasted little time in putting that money to use. Just two months later, in May, it snapped up Jony Ive’s AI devices startup IO Products Inc. for around $6.4 billion to support its efforts to “create a new generation of AI-powered computers.”

OpenAI was also said to be interested in buying the generative AI coding startup Windsurf for around $3 billion, but the negotiations apparently broke down. Then, in July, Google LLC managed to entice Windsurf’s co-founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen to join its own AI team, as part of a $2.4 billion technology licensing deal. Days later, another AI coding startup called Cognition AI Inc. swooped in to acquire Windsurf, minus its co-founders.

Photo: API Excellence/YouTube