OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman says the company could be ready to go public next year. TechCrunch AI reports that when an interviewer at a Wall Street Journal tech conference on Wednesday asked whether OpenAI would be IPO-ready in 2027, he answered, “I think so. Yes.”
That isn’t a filing, a date or a promise. The bigger news is the reason he gave for feeling confident: OpenAI now makes most of its money from businesses, not consumers.
The quick version
- Brockman expects OpenAI to be ready for an IPO in 2027, but says it’ll go public “when we feel is the right time for us.”
- Annualized revenue grew 70% in the third quarter, and he credits the enterprise business doubling.
- Enterprise is now the majority of revenue, up from around 30%.
- Consumer revenue hasn’t shrunk, he says. It’s still growing, just more slowly than enterprise.
- The first half of 2026 was “pretty rough” by his own account.
He admitted OpenAI was behind
The most interesting part of the interview was what Brockman conceded. He said OpenAI “wasn’t even in the conversation” on agentic coding, meaning AI tools that can carry out coding tasks with little hand-holding. Anthropic’s Claude Code has been gaining market share in that category.
“We had Codex, but no one was talking about it,” Brockman said, “and I think that we just kept our heads down and executed.”
He also said the third-quarter jump didn’t come from anything that happened in those three months. He described it as the payoff from earlier investments. And he was blunt about where OpenAI stood 12 months ago: “A year ago, we weren’t even really in the enterprise game, right? We were really perceived as a consumer company.” Potential customers would ask whether OpenAI was really committed to the enterprise.
Why this matters
This is significant because it changes the story OpenAI can tell public investors. Consumer subscriptions can be fickle. Enterprise contracts tend to be easier to forecast, and that’s usually what public market investors want to see.
It also makes this a direct fight with Anthropic, which got into enterprise accounts first. Brockman pointed to a recent partnership with JPMorgan Chase as an example of the clients OpenAI is now winning. He says the company learned it has to do three things: help businesses pick the most important milestones they can reach with AI, earn their trust, and prove it’ll be a reliable partner for the long haul.
For anyone buying AI tools, I think this is good news. Two serious vendors chasing the same accounts should give you more leverage on price and support.
Read the numbers carefully
These are stage remarks from an executive, not audited results, and there are real gaps:
- No dollar figures. We don’t know what the 70% growth was measured against.
- No exact enterprise share. “Majority” could mean 51% or 80%.
- No date on the 30% figure. TechCrunch’s report only says enterprise “previously” accounted for around that share.
That last one matters. Run the math: if enterprise started at 30% of revenue and doubled while total revenue grew 70%, it would land at about 35%, nowhere near a majority. So the shift probably took longer than one quarter, or the figures are measuring different things.
What to watch
- Whether growth holds in the fourth quarter, since one strong quarter after two rough ones isn’t a trend yet.
- Any sign of an actual filing. That’s when audited numbers would finally replace conference quotes.
- Whether Codex keeps gaining ground on Claude Code. Brockman’s comeback story leans heavily on it.
- If you’re signing an enterprise AI contract, whether a competing bid from the other vendor gets you a better deal.
Brockman says he’s “never felt more confident” in what OpenAI is doing. If the company does file, investors will get to check that against the books. More details are available in TechCrunch AI’s original report.