OpenAI has a new sales chief, again. The company announced Aug. 14 that Dali Rajic, former president and chief operating officer of the cybersecurity firm Wiz, will become chief revenue officer, replacing Denise Dresser, who joined in December and is leaving after eight months on the job.
The appointment gives OpenAI its second CRO in less than a year, a churn rate that would raise eyebrows at any company and is drawing particular scrutiny because of what OpenAI is preparing for: a public listing. The people who sell the company’s products now report to a leader who must prove the revenue machine works before Wall Street prices the stock, people familiar with the company’s plans said.
Rajic arrives from Wiz, the cloud-security company that Google agreed to acquire this June for $32 billion. As president and chief operating officer, he helped scale Wiz’s enterprise sales operation through a period of rapid growth that ended in one of the largest acquisitions in cybersecurity history. OpenAI executives said his experience selling complex infrastructure to large enterprises was the deciding factor in the hire.
Dresser’s departure follows a pattern of executive turnover in OpenAI’s commercial ranks. Brad Lightcap, Fidji Simo and Kevin Weil have all left the company in recent months, departures that insiders described as a mix of transition and reorganization as OpenAI shifts from research lab culture to public-company discipline. The company has not commented on individual exits beyond thanking the departing executives for their contributions.
The revenue organization is the most consequential piece of that shift. OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate grew more than 20 percent month over month in July, and its enterprise customer business grew 32 percent, figures the company has cited in its pitch to investors. Those numbers now land on Rajic’s desk, and the market’s attention has moved from model launches to the curve those numbers trace.
President Greg Brockman framed the leadership change in explicitly financial terms. The next phase, he said, is proving that every dollar a customer spends on AI produces measurable business value. That sentence is the company’s new sales pitch in miniature: less about the frontier model, more about the return on investment customers can document.
The timing matters because OpenAI is widely expected to file for an initial public offering in the coming quarters. Companies preparing to list typically stabilize their executive teams well before the roadshow, and a revenue chief who joined eight months ago and left has complicated that narrative. Rajic’s hire is meant to close the question, and people familiar with the process said he was given a mandate that includes both the enterprise sales force and the partnerships that route OpenAI products through other companies.
The CRO role at OpenAI is unusually demanding because the company sells in two modes at once. It sells subscriptions and API access to millions of developers and businesses, and it runs strategic deals with hyperscalers that resell or embed its models. Rajic inherits both, plus the consumer products whose subscription growth has been the fastest-moving part of the business.
Analysts said the leadership churn is less alarming than it appears because OpenAI’s revenue growth has continued through every departure. The company’s July numbers, the enterprise growth rate and the expanding customer base all suggest the machine runs on product momentum rather than any single executive. The risk, they said, is distraction: every leadership change costs months of institutional memory at a time when competitors are closing the gap on OpenAI’s models.
The company is also managing a transition in how it sells. OpenAI has moved from selling model access to selling full solutions, complete with deployment, evaluation and support, a shift that requires a different sales force than the one Dresser inherited. Rajic’s Wiz background, where sales cycles were long, technical and aimed at chief information officers, aligns with where OpenAI is heading, people close to the company said.
OpenAI’s sales organization has grown from a small account team two years ago to a global operation with regional offices in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The company has hired aggressively from enterprise software rivals, building a force that sells to chief information officers rather than developers alone. Rajic’s mandate, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, includes reshaping that force around industry verticals, with dedicated teams for financial services, health care and the public sector. The reorganization is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
The announcement closes one chapter and opens another. Dresser’s eight-month tenure ends after a transition period, and Rajic takes over a revenue engine growing at rates most public software companies would envy. The market watching OpenAI’s path to an IPO will focus on one question in the months ahead: whether the revenue curve keeps climbing under its new sales chief. The name on the door matters less than the numbers behind it, and the numbers so far have kept climbing.
