OpenAI has acqui-hired the team behind Convogo, a platform that helped executive coaches, HR leaders, and consultants automate leadership assessments and feedback reporting. The deal involves hiring the three co-founders: Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett, through an all-stock agreement to work on the company’s “AI cloud efforts.” OpenAI is not acquiring Convogo’s technology or intellectual property, which means the Convogo product will be wound down.
Convogo began as a hackathon project aimed at automating time-consuming reporting tasks for executive coaches. Over the past two years, the platform served thousands of coaches and partnered with leading leadership development firms. In joining OpenAI, the team plans to focus on bridging the gap between AI model capabilities and real-world professional applications, creating purpose-built experiences across industries.
This acqui-hire marks OpenAI’s ninth acquisition in the past year, reflecting a broader strategy of using mergers and acquisitions to accelerate talent and capability. In most previous cases, OpenAI either integrated the acquired technology into its ecosystem or shut down the product as the team joined the company, consistent with the approach taken with Convogo. The deal underscores OpenAI’s continued emphasis on talent acquisition as a driver for expanding its AI capabilities.
