OpenAI's chief operating officer departs and it replaces its revenue chief

Two of OpenAI’s senior executives left within days of each other in mid-August. Brad Lightcap, an employee since 2018 who had been chief financial officer and then chief operating officer since 2022 before moving into a “special projects” role earlier in the year, announced on 11 August that he was leaving to “start something new,” saying only that he had spent recent months thinking about “what would stand in the way of mission success.” Two days later, OpenAI named Dali Rajic — until then president and chief operating officer of the cybersecurity firm Wiz, which Google had acquired earlier in 2026 — as its new chief revenue officer, replacing Denise Dresser after roughly nine months in the role. Co-founder and president Greg Brockman announced the Rajic hire and thanked Dresser for having “led our revenue organization through a formative period.”

Neither move was presented as a firing, and OpenAI did not disclose Lightcap’s next venture or the reason for Dresser’s short tenure beyond a standard departure statement. The changes extended an executive turnover that had already seen Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s number-two executive as chief executive of applications, step down the previous month, alongside earlier departures including the former head of its now-discontinued Sora video product. Brockman has taken on a larger management role as a result.

The reshuffle came as OpenAI prepared for a prospective initial public offering, having filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and completed a multibillion-dollar employee tender offer, and amid reports that the company had underperformed internal revenue targets despite surpassing a billion weekly active users. Rajic’s hire from a company built on “operating discipline and customer-focused execution” reads as a bet that sales rigor, rather than product breadth, is OpenAI’s next constraint.