According to TechCrunch, OpenAI is kicking off the new year with an acqui-hire of the team behind Convogo, a business software platform for executive coaches and HR teams. The AI giant is not acquiring Convogo’s IP or technology, but is hiring its three co-founders—Matt Cooper, Evan Cater, and Mike Gillett—in an all-stock deal. The Convogo product itself will be wound down. This marks OpenAI’s ninth acquisition in the span of a single year, per PitchBook data. In nearly all of those prior deals, the acquired product was either folded into OpenAI or shut down completely as the team joined.
The Talent Grab Accelerates
Here’s the thing: this isn’t about buying a product. It’s a straight-up talent acquisition. OpenAI‘s spokesperson said the team will work on “AI cloud efforts,” which is a pretty broad mandate. Basically, they’re buying a team that knows how to take powerful AI models and build “thoughtful, purpose-built experiences” around them for specific professionals—in this case, coaches. That’s a valuable skill set, especially for a company whose core offering is an API and models that need to be integrated into real workflows. But it also highlights a potential weakness. Does OpenAI lack enough internal product thinkers who can bridge that gap between raw model capability and useful application?
A Familiar Pattern of Shutdowns
And this follows a now-familiar, somewhat ruthless pattern. Convogo joins a list of startups like Roi, Context.ai, and Crossing Minds, where the product gets shut down post-acquisition. The founders get a nice exit, OpenAI gets smart people, and the startup’s customers get left in the lurch. It’s a classic Silicon Valley move, but it raises questions. What happens to all those “thousands” of coaches and “world’s top leadership development firms” that relied on Convogo? They’re basically told to find a new tool. For a company like OpenAI that wants to be the foundational layer for everything, burning through the ecosystems of the companies it acquires seems… shortsighted? Or maybe they just don’t care about niche B2B software markets.
The Hardware Exception
The one glaring exception to this “acquire-and-shutter” rule is the deal with Jony Ive’s io Products. That’s continuing its own roadmap as they collaborate on AI hardware. So, what’s the difference? Well, hardware is hard. You can’t just absorb a hardware team and their IP into your software-focused org overnight. You need their continued focus and institutional knowledge. It’s the clearest signal yet that OpenAI’s ambitions go far beyond chatbots and APIs. They’re playing a different, much more capital-intensive game there. For everyone else, it seems the playbook is clear: join us, your product dies, and your talent gets absorbed into the machine. Literally.
