OpenAI Taps SpaceX Veteran to Lead Global Sales Push

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI has appointed former SpaceX executive Brian McCarthy as its first vice president of worldwide sales. The newly created role comes as the artificial intelligence company scales its enterprise commercial operations ahead of an anticipated public listing.

McCarthy’s appointment is the first major hire under OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Dali Rajic, who joined the company on Aug. 24. He will oversee the expansion of OpenAI’s global sales infrastructure and efforts to accelerate corporate adoption of its artificial intelligence models across international markets.

The move reunites McCarthy and Rajic, who worked together at application performance management software company AppDynamics from 2017 to 2018. Rajic was chief revenue officer there, while McCarthy served as vice president of sales. The sales team prepared AppDynamics for an initial public offering before technology conglomerate Cisco Systems acquired the company for $3.7 billion in January 2017, one day before its scheduled stock market debut.

Rajic later spent over four years as chief revenue officer and chief operating officer at cloud security firm Zscaler. At OpenAI, she said McCarthy “combines a deep commitment to customers with a belief in what technology can do for people.” “I’m excited to partner with him as we scale our business, help enterprises transform, and bring the benefits of AI to more people around the world,” Rajic said in a statement posted to LinkedIn.

McCarthy joins OpenAI from SpaceX, where he arrived after the spacecraft manufacturer acquired code-editing platform Cursor. At both Cursor and SpaceX, he served as president of global revenue and worldwide field operations. His enterprise technology career has also included leading field sales and revenue operations at Rubrik, ThoughtSpot, Qlik, and AppDynamics.

In his own statement, McCarthy said his decision to join OpenAI was driven by the enterprise vision established by Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, co-founder and President Greg Brockman, and Rajic. “AI should help people solve hard problems, do more than they thought possible, and create new opportunities,” he wrote. “With technology this powerful, we have a responsibility to get it right. For me, that means helping customers use it safely, keeping people in control, and making sure as many people as possible benefit.”

The appointment comes amid intensifying competition between OpenAI and rival AI developers, notably Anthropic, for corporate IT spending. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab and created a commercial capped-profit arm in 2019. Its business offerings have expanded beyond consumer applications like ChatGPT to include large-scale corporate deployments through ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team, and developer API services.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. With its Claude family of models and specialized developer tools such as Claude Code, the company has emerged as OpenAI’s primary competitor in the enterprise sector. Corporate spending data from financial platform Ramp recently showed enterprise expenditure on OpenAI’s latest Astra model surpassing spending on Anthropic’s flagship Fable model.

Building out an enterprise sales force and securing multi-year corporate contracts are seen as central elements of OpenAI’s strategy to build reliable revenue streams ahead of an initial public offering, which industry observers expect the company could pursue as early as next year. McCarthy will work alongside Rajic to recruit additional sales talent, manage enterprise account teams, and expand customer outreach across Europe, Asia, and other overseas markets.