OpenAI’s Brad Lightcap leads global expansion, pursuit of enterprise

Sam Taman Someone needed to manage financial affairs. It was 2018, and Openai was still a non -profit research group with 40 employees, a consumer product, nor a clear revenue model. But someone had to oversee money.

He asked Altman Brad Lightcap, with whom he worked at Startup Accessor Y Combinator, to help him search. Lightcap met more than 20 people. Nobody wants the job. So Lightcap decided to do it himself, as he entered into a temporary role as the first business inside what was still unambiguously.

“We had no idea that we will create a chat that many people would talk to them.” “This was not only in the concept.”

After seven years of joining the startup starting, Lightcap operates a 500 billion dollar startups with 3000 employees. His mission is to rotate Openai of the consumer phenomenon, known to create ChatGPT and ignite the mutation of obstetric artificial intelligence, to a force in the institution.

The company took a big step in this direction this week, as new offices in Brazil, Australia and India announced a response to commercial demand.

As new markets enter, LightCAP should not worry about building a brand. Chatgpt now includes more than 700 million active users per week less than three years of its presence.

But selling in the institution requires bodies. During the past 18 months, LightCAP has built Openai to go to the market from about 50 people to more than 700, which includes sales representatives and employees who focus on customer success, developers and strategic partnerships.

The batch started in 2023, with GPT-4 and the launch of Chatgpt Enterprise. Companies can suddenly see that the large language models in Openai were able to deal with workfighting tasks reliably. Customers began to come from every direction.

“This was the first time that it crossed the smart models enough to solve problems actually for companies,” said Lightcap, 34, in an interview this week. “We have seen a great request that come out of this launch.”

Conversation Start Using Chatgpt Enterprise To accelerate the discovery of drugs and summarize huge amounts of research data. Uber A dedicated tool that allows the engineering teams clicked on Openai models to support customers, driver experience and internal productivity. Morgan Stanley For the first time GPT-4 in the workflow of the wealth management team, then extended integration in that Banking services and investment trading.

“I see our responsibility as building tools and the universe, in some respects, the most knowledgeable people in the world about how to publish them,” said Lightcap. “We took it seriously from the first day.”

Openai’s Prowout does not depend on traditional sales representatives. Instead, its strategy to the market greatly tends to engineers who work directly with Enterprise partners to ensure the solution of real work problems.

While plays a major role in the global development of one of the fastest companies in the Silicon Valley, LightCap also has to manage a sensitive relationship with the nearest Openai and the emerging competitor, Microsoft.

Microsoft is the main investor in Openai, where it has poured about $ 13 billion in the company, and its primary cloud provider. Openai’s models are tightly combined into Microsoft products such as Copilot, and the software giant has used its close relationships with Openai to provide early access to tools before they are available on other clouds.

Openai is the deepest Openai to the sales of institutions, and the more the two companies collide.

For companies that already work on Azure, the Microsoft Stadium is a smooth integration that comes with the addition of Openai models to the current stack. But going directly through Openai provides proximity to the teams that build the Frontier technology.

It is not the only market in which they are heading to face. In microsoft Annual deposit Last year, the company officially included Openai as a competitor in research and news advertising. Disclosures fell after Openai revealed an initial model called Searchgpt, which confirms how quickly the interests of the two companies are overlapping.

This week, Microsoft said it started Public test The local artificial intelligence model is called the Mai-1-PREVIEW, which can lead to improvements to its COPILOT assistant for consumers.

Lightcap reduce competition.

“The opportunity space is so giant that it is impossible not to collide with everyone else,” he said. He stressed that the Openai key is the quality of its models, safety and reliability, and how the company works with customers.

Microsoft did not respond to the comment request.

The two companies are now re -negotiating the conditions of its partnership, including dividing the sales of institutions, which provide 80 % of the revenue to Openai when it has customer relationship.

Other tension points include Openai’s work with different cloud service providers and the governance system that will constitute the next stage of Openai growth as it is Rusing 40 billion dollars And restructuring to a commercial entity.

With the expansion of Openai to new areas, it describes its approach to reflects the local demand, its preferences and cases of use.

In Brazil, there is now the fastest Openai market in Latin America, more than 50 million users per month in Chatgpt send about 140 million messages per day. India, with the increasing developer base, has become the second largest community of the company around the world. Australia, the home of some of the first users for an Openai (API) applications, appears as a center for the adoption of the institution throughout the Asia Pacific region.

The Sao Paulo office will double as a training center for teachers, non -profit organizations and small companies, and as a community center for the prosperous developers base in Brazil.

“There is real energy about artificial intelligence throughout Brazil,” said Lacpe. “Startups are moving quickly, and major companies already put these tools to work. Opening an office here helps us stay near customers and partners and support this momentum.”

Openai is locally employed to take advantage of the ecosystems of the active developer. In Australia, Sydney’s office will be a beach head for institutional customers throughout the Pacific. In Japan, where the company has already launched a joint project Softbank To put the institution’s tools At the level of the countryThe Tokyo team is designed to focus on the cases of allocated use Such as automation, robots and productivity that AI drives.

“My colleagues in Japan have also learned about how to improve how to go to the market, and how to improve the way we provide services to institutions,” said Lightcap. “Thus, this learning process really becomes this bilateral direction.”

The global LightCAP could not have imagined seven years ago, when the emerging laboratory to which he joined from a three -storey building in the Mission in San Francisco.

At dinner in San Francisco in August, LightCap was sitting at the table of his boss. He nodded his head as Al -Taman described how life was at that time and the short work days outside the limelight.

Al -Taman said, “We really have a nice life.” “We were the smartest people in the world doing the most interesting sciences, on the limits of discovery, in this great secret.”

– CNBC Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

He watches: Saman says that Openai pushed a “warmer” tone for GPT-5