OpenAI Acqui-hires Convogo Team, Shuts Down Leadership Software Product
Ninth acquisition in a year highlights OpenAI’s focus on talent.
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OpenAI has begun the year by absorbing the founding team behind Convogo, a niche business software startup focused on automating leadership assessments and feedback reporting for executive coaches, consultants, and HR teams.
The ChatGPT-maker is not acquiring Convogo’s intellectual property or underlying technology. Instead, it is bringing on the three co-founders — Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett — to contribute to its broader “AI cloud efforts.” A source familiar with the transaction described it as an all-stock deal. Convogo’s product will be shut down following the acquisition.
Founded as what the team describes as a “weekend hackathon,” Convogo emerged from a practical question posed by Cooper’s mother, an executive coach: Could AI take over the labor-intensive task of report writing, freeing coaches to focus on human interaction?
Over the past two years, the startup claims to have worked with thousands of coaches and partnered with leading leadership development firms, positioning itself at the intersection of generative AI and professional services.
In an email announcing the acquisition, the Convogo founders stated that their work had revealed a deeper structural challenge in enterprise AI adoption: translating rapid advances in model capabilities into tangible, real-world outcomes. They argued that this gap can only be closed through carefully designed, purpose-built tools tailored to specific professional contexts — an approach they say aligns with OpenAI’s ambitions at scale.
This Convogo acqui-hire is OpenAI’s ninth acquisition in roughly a year, according to data from PitchBook. The pattern across these deals has been consistent. In several cases, products were integrated into OpenAI’s ecosystem, such as Sky, an AI interface for Mac, and Statsig, a product experimentation platform. In others — including Roi, Context.ai, and Crossing Minds — the products were discontinued as teams were folded into OpenAI.
These moves suggest that OpenAI is increasingly using mergers and acquisitions as a mechanism for rapidly scaling talent and applied expertise, rather than expanding its product portfolio directly. The exception is the company’s partnership-driven acquisition of Jonny Ive’s io Products, which continues to operate on its own roadmap as it collaborates with OpenAI on a new class of AI hardware.
As competition intensifies across foundation models and AI platforms, OpenAI’s dealmaking strategy emphasizes people and execution, and not just machine learning models.
