OpenAI's Brockman Says Company Could Be Ready for IPO in 2027 as Enterprise Sales Lead

Asked on stage at a Wall Street Journal technology conference in Napa, California, on Wednesday whether OpenAI would be ready for an initial public offering next year, Brockman answered: "I think so. Yes." He gave no timetable, saying the company wants to list "when we feel is the right time for us", according to TechCrunch's account of the session.

The remarks are the clearest public signal yet from OpenAI's senior leadership on when it might list. They also came as investors were reconsidering how much to pay for AI companies. Anthropic, OpenAI's main rival for corporate customers, has been preparing a listing that Reuters said is likely before the end of the year. Since the US midterm elections, prospective buyers have questioned whether its $1.5 trillion valuation target can hold after a sharp sell-off in technology shares.

Brockman described a year of two halves. The first and second quarters of 2026 were "pretty rough", he said. In the third quarter, OpenAI's annualised revenue grew 70% from the previous quarter, which he attributed to its enterprise business doubling. Enterprise now makes up the majority of revenue, up from about 30%, he said, while consumer revenue has kept growing. He pointed to a recent partnership with JPMorgan Chase as an example of the corporate work.

The figures are hard to line up exactly with earlier disclosures. When OpenAI closed a funding round in March at an $852 billion post-money valuation, enterprise was put at more than 40% of revenue and was expected to match consumer revenue by the end of 2026. Brockman's account suggests that point was reached sooner than planned, though he did not give dollar figures on Wednesday.

He was also frank about where OpenAI had fallen behind. In agentic coding, where Anthropic's Claude Code has won market share, OpenAI "wasn't even in the conversation", Brockman said. The company had Codex, he said, but "no one was talking about it." A year ago, he said, customers saw OpenAI as a consumer company, and it had to prove it was committed to business clients. He said that view has since changed.

Codex has become central to that effort. OpenAI has been adding developer tools around the coding agent, and on Thursday it agreed to buy Pierre, a start-up whose Git-based code storage it plans to bring into Codex. It has also been selling to security teams, releasing a cybersecurity variant of its GPT-6 model this week.

OpenAI has delayed its listing plans before, and Reuters reported that the company has been trying to raise money quickly to take advantage of its recent growth. Brockman's answer stops short of a commitment to list in 2027. The next sign will come from Anthropic's offering, the first test of how public markets price a leading AI lab.