OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, is leaving the company less than eight months after taking the job, CNBC reported Thursday. Her exit follows AI Insiders’ report on 13 August that Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, was also departing, the fourth senior exit the company has logged ahead of a planned initial public offering. A revenue chief leaving on the eve of an IPO is a different kind of departure than an engineering or product exit, because Dresser is the executive whose numbers investors will be asked to trust.
OpenAI has already named a replacement. Dali Rajic, most recently president and COO of Wiz, the cloud security company Google agreed to acquire for $32 billion, will take over the revenue organization. Dresser will stay on briefly to help with the handoff, working with OpenAI President Greg Brockman to transition relationships with enterprise customers, according to the company.
Dresser joined OpenAI in December after more than ten years in executive roles at Salesforce, arriving with enterprise sales experience OpenAI has said it needed to compete with rival Anthropic for corporate accounts. In April, OpenAI widened her mandate further, handing her much of Lightcap’s workload as he moved into a role the company described as focused on special projects. Four months later, both are out.
The exits extend beyond this single week. Fidji Simo, who ran product and business at OpenAI, stepped down last month citing a health issue, joining three other executives who left the company in April. Four senior leaders departing within a few months, now compounded by a chief operating officer and a chief revenue officer exiting in the same week, is the pattern an investor reading the IPO prospectus should weigh more heavily than any single resignation.
OpenAI submitted a confidential IPO filing to the SEC in June, shortly after Anthropic filed its own paperwork, and carries an $852 billion valuation from a funding round closed in March. Justifying that price to public shareholders depends heavily on the enterprise segment Dresser was hired to grow. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC in January that enterprise customers generated roughly 40% of the company’s revenue, with that share expected to approach 50% by year end; Dresser said in April that the business was on track to hit the target.
OpenAI’s release said Dresser is leaving “to pursue other opportunities,” and CNBC’s reporting does not describe any dispute over strategy or performance. What the company has not addressed is who now owns the enterprise revenue goal Dresser was tracking toward, at the moment public market investors will start demanding an answer in writing.
Rajic inherits that target without Dresser’s record inside OpenAI’s sales organization, arriving just as the company prepares to defend its valuation to outside shareholders. Anyone evaluating the IPO should treat second-half enterprise revenue guidance as provisional until Rajic’s team reports its own numbers.
CNBC, in reporting by Ashley Capoot published 13 August 2026, first reported Dresser’s departure and OpenAI’s succession plan.
