OpenAI recruits Wiz's COO to lead its next phase of growth
Dali Rajic has been appointed CRO as the company prepares for a potential IPO and faces intensifying competition from Anthropic for corporate customers.
OpenAI is turning to a familiar figure from the cybersecurity world to lead its next stage of commercial expansion, appointing Dali Rajic as chief revenue officer as the company prepares to scale its business with enterprises.
Rajic joins from Wiz, where he served as president and chief operating officer of the Israeli cybersecurity company that was acquired by Google. He has been at Wiz since February 2024.
The appointment also comes with a notable change at the top of OpenAI's commercial organization. Denise Dresser, who joined the company less than a year ago after more than a decade at Salesforce, is leaving to pursue other opportunities. She will remain during a transition period to support customers and the business team.
The timing makes the change particularly significant. OpenAI is approaching a potentially transformative period as it prepares for a public offering and seeks to turn the extraordinary popularity of ChatGPT and its models into a durable enterprise business.
OpenAI said its products now reach more than one billion weekly active users and more than two million businesses, with the number of businesses having doubled over the past year. The company has also been trying to increase the share of its business coming from corporate customers, putting it into increasingly direct competition with Anthropic.
Dresser had been hired to strengthen that enterprise push. In April, she told CNBC that OpenAI's enterprise business was on track to reach a target of accounting for roughly half of the company's business by the end of the year. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in January that enterprises represented about 40% of the company's business at the time.
Rajic's background is closely aligned with that challenge.
At Wiz, he helped run a company that grew rapidly by selling cybersecurity products to large organizations as well as technical customers. Before joining Wiz, he served as president and chief operating officer of Zscaler and as chief customer and revenue officer at AppDynamics.
"OpenAI has extraordinary technology, products that more than one billion people already love, and enormous market pull," Rajic said. "I'm excited to join the team, build on the momentum already in place, and lead the revenue organization as we help customers realize the full value of AI."
