OpenAI begins the new year with a new acquisition. The AI giant is acquiring the team behind Convogo, a business software platform that helps executive coaches, consultants, talent leaders, and human resources teams automate and improve leadership assessments and feedback reporting.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company will not acquire Convogo’s IP or technology, but instead will hire a team to work on its “AI cloud efforts.” The three co-founders Matt Cooper, Evan Cater and Mike Gillette will join OpenAI as part of what people familiar with the matter say is an all-stock deal.
Convogo’s products will be discontinued.
The startup began as a “weekend hackathon” prompted by a question from Cooper’s mother, an executive coach. Could an AI tool automate the tedious task of reporting so she could spend more time doing the human coaching work she loves? Over the past two years, Convogo has helped “thousands” of coaches and partnered with “the world’s top leadership development companies,” according to an email sent by Convogo announcing the acquisition news.
The team wrote in an email that the real problem they discovered in their work was how to bridge the gap between what can be achieved with each new model release and how to translate that into real-world results.
“We believe more than ever that the key to bridging that gap lies in thoughtful, purposeful experiences like the one we’ve built for coaches at Convogo,” the founders wrote. “That’s why we’re excited to join OpenAI and continue our work to make AI accessible and useful to professionals across all industries.”
The acquisition of Convogo is OpenAI’s ninth acquisition in the past year, according to PitchBook data. In nearly all of these acquisitions, the products were either folded into OpenAI’s ecosystem, as in the case of AI interface for Mac Sky and product testing company Statsig, or shut down entirely as teams joined OpenAI, as in the case of Roi, Context.ai, and Crossing Minds.
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The deal with Convogo also shows that OpenAI, like its competitors, is using M&A as a talent and talent accelerator. The main exception to this rule is OpenAI’s acquisition of Jonny Ive’s io Products, with both companies continuing their product roadmaps by collaborating on AI hardware development.
