OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser is leaving the company in the coming weeks, her second-most-senior counterpart Brad Lightcap having announced his own exit two days earlier. Dresser joined OpenAI in December from Slack, where she had been CEO, meaning her tenure as CRO ran roughly eight months. Dali Rajic, president and COO of cloud security company Wiz, will take over the role. The turnover lands as OpenAI prepares for a public listing after filing a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June.
Dresser said in a note posted to LinkedIn that she plans to pursue other opportunities. She had absorbed portions of Lightcap's remit earlier this year when he shifted from COO to a special projects role, meaning OpenAI is now cycling through the top of its go-to-market and operations stack for the second time in months.
Rajic arrives from Wiz, the cloud security firm Google agreed to acquire in a deal announced earlier in 2025. At Wiz he ran revenue and operations during one of the fastest enterprise-software growth stories on record, which is the pitch OpenAI is making to justify handing him the commercial engine as the company scales its business tier and API revenue toward an IPO.
Key facts
- 01Denise Dresser is leaving OpenAI eight months after joining as CRO in December from Slack, where she was CEO.
- 02Wiz president and COO Dali Rajic will take over as chief revenue officer at OpenAI.
- 03Dresser's exit follows Brad Lightcap's departure announcement two days earlier, on August 13, 2026.
- 04OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC in June, setting up an IPO run.
- 05Former AGI lead Fidji Simo and former CMO Kate Rouch also recently stepped down.
OpenAI framed the change around the shift toward agentic products and enterprise deployment.
The Dresser exit is the fourth senior departure OpenAI has disclosed in recent months. Fidji Simo stepped down from leading the company's AGI work, citing illness. Former chief marketing officer Kate Rouch also left. Lightcap, who had been COO before moving to special projects, said this week he would leave outright. Four C-suite or C-suite-adjacent transitions inside a single reporting cycle is a meaningful signal about how much the internal organization is being redrawn.
The revenue chief role at OpenAI is the seat responsible for turning ChatGPT enterprise contracts, API usage, and the coming wave of agent products into predictable, forecastable revenue that public-market investors can underwrite. That is a different job than the one Dresser was hired into in December, when the company's commercial motion was still built primarily around consumer subscriptions and developer API usage. The pitch OpenAI is now making to prospective IPO investors is that agents will change how companies buy software, and the CRO is the person who has to translate that into contracted annual revenue.
Rajic's Wiz experience is directly relevant to that translation problem. Wiz scaled from zero to hundreds of millions in ARR in under four years by selling into large enterprise security budgets, the same buyer profile OpenAI is now trying to convert from pilot to production. His mandate at OpenAI, per the company's statement, is to build the revenue operating system for the next phase — meaning the pricing, packaging, and sales-motion infrastructure that a public AI company needs to hit quarterly numbers.
The counterweight is the frequency of the changes themselves. Four senior departures inside a few months, at a company about to go public, is the kind of pattern IPO underwriters and prospective institutional investors do notice. OpenAI has not explained why the reorganization is happening now rather than after a listing, and Dresser's own note did not detail what comes next for her. The company also has not said whether further senior changes are coming.
For OpenAI, the substantive question is whether Rajic can build a durable enterprise revenue machine faster than the departures cost the company continuity with existing customers. The company's commercial book is now large enough that continuity matters — enterprise buyers signing multi-year contracts want to know who owns the relationship in year two. Hiring the operator behind one of the fastest enterprise ramps of the past decade is a rational answer to that question, but the answer only holds if the churn at the top stops here. The IPO clock is now the one that matters, and every senior exit between the S-1 filing and the road show gets read as a data point about internal cohesion.
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