India might not yet be at the forefront of developing technology for the AI revolution, but Indian origin founders are already playing their part.
OpenAI has acquired Statsig, a data platform for product development, for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal. Statsig was founded by Vijaye Raji, who had graduated from Pondicherry University in 1999. As a part of the deal, Statsig employees have joined OpenAI, and Raji has become OpenAI’s CTO of Applications.
“Vijaye has a remarkable record of building new consumer and B2B products and systems at scale,” said Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI. “He’s joining at a time when our models are opening entirely new ways to build, and his leadership will help turn that progress into safe applications that empower people with many new tools to improve their lives, help companies increase their impact and allow developers to build faster and better products,” she added.
Statsig lets companies use analytics to build better products. It helps them make smarter product decisions with an integrated platform for experimentation, analytics, feature flags and session replays. Companies can build a complete set of product metrics, iterate with flags and experiments, and then analyze the results with a stats engine and advanced product analytics. Statsig had 2.5 billion unique monthly experiment subjects, and was used by companies including Notion, Lime and Brex. OpenAI too had been using its services, and was likely sufficiently impressed to acquire the entire company.
Vijaye Raji has had an interesting journey to being acquired by the world’s hottest startup. He had graduated from Pondicherry University with a BE degree in 1999. He’d then joined Microsoft, and stayed with the company for 10 years, eventually becoming a Principal Software Design Engineer. Raji had then joined Facebook in 2011 as a Software Engineer, and had become a Director and Head of Engineering in 2014. In 2015, he’d become the Head of Facebook Seattle, and in 2017 had become the VP and Head of Gaming at the company. In 2019, he’d become the VP of Head and Entertainment at Facebook. In 2021, he’d quit Facebook and founded Statsig. Statsig was last valued at $1.1 billion, and was closed to being acquired by Datadog, but the deal fell through.
Statsig has now been acquired by OpenAI, and Raji has become OpenAI’s CTO of Applications. Having an in-house product analytics team could help OpenAI — model abilities across companies are converging rapidly, and the differentiator might end up being product experience. And Vijaye Raji is yet another example of how one doesn’t need to have to be from an IIT or IIM to make it big in the tech world.