As 2026 begins, OpenAI has not slowed its expansion. Recently, this AI giant announced that it has completed the acquisition of the team behind the corporate coaching software platformConvogo. This all-stock transaction aims to bring the core talent of the startup under OpenAI's umbrella to enhance its service capabilities in the enterprise market.

Convogo was initially born out of a "weekend hackathon," with its founding inspiration coming from the founder's mother, a leadership coach. The platform aims to automate tedious report writing and leadership assessment tasks through AI, allowing coaches to focus more on human-centric guidance. Over the past two years, Convogo has successfully served thousands of coaches and established deep partnerships with top global leadership development companies.

OpenAI

Image source note: The image is AI-generated, and the image licensing provider is Midjourney.

Notably, this acquisition is a typical "acqui-hire." An OpenAI spokesperson clearly stated that the company did not purchase Convogo's intellectual property or technology, but rather, the three co-founders joined OpenAI directly to work on the "AI Cloud Program." As a result, Convogo's existing product services will be gradually shut down.

According to statistics, this is the ninth acquisition by OpenAI in the past year. In addition to the previous acquisition of Jony Ive's io Products, which aimed to develop AI hardware, most of OpenAI's moves have focused on directly absorbing excellent teams to accelerate the construction of its ecosystem. This acquisition of the Convogo team once again proves that OpenAI is aggressively building up its talent pool through mergers and acquisitions to better transform AI technology into productivity tools for specialized fields.

Key points:

  • 🤝 Core team integration: OpenAI completed the talent acquisition of Convogo through an all-stock transaction, with the three founders joining its AI cloud business department.

  • 📉 Existing products will be discontinued: This transaction does not involve the acquisition of technical intellectual property, and Convogo's existing automated coaching tools and reporting systems will stop operating.

  • 🚀 Accelerated M&A pace: This transaction marks the start of OpenAI's M&A activities in 2026; in the previous year, the company had completed nine targeted acquisitions consecutively.