OpenAI said late Wednesday that it’s tapped Instacart CEO Fidji Simo as the head of its applications business, reporting to CEO Sam Altman.
In a memo to employees that OpenAI published on its blog, Altman said that Simo, who joined the artificial intelligence startup’s board last year, is assuming the title of CEO of Applications.
“Applications brings together a group of existing business and operational teams responsible for how our research reaches and benefits the world,” Altman wrote. He said that Simo will “focus on enabling our ‘traditional’ company functions to scale as we enter a next phase of growth.”
The announcement comes two days after OpenAI said that its nonprofit would retain control of the company even as it restructures into a public benefit corporation, bowing to pressure from civic leaders and ex-employees. Founded as a research lab in 2015, OpenAI has been engulfed in a heated legal battle with Elon Musk, a co-founder who now runs AI rival xAI. Musk is trying to keep OpenAI from converting into a for-profit company as he competes in the generative AI market with his own startup, xAI.
Simo, who was one of CNBC’s Changemakers in 2024, took Instacart public a year earlier, helping to break the longest tech IPO drought in three decades. The company, which has an army of contractors delivering groceries to consumers, boomed during the Covid pandemic as Americans were sheltered in place.
“There were a lot of questions about whether Instacart would be just another pandemic fad,” Simo told CNBC. “And we have now proven that we not only kept the Covid gains, but grew on top of the Covid gains and grew sustainably and profitably, which is really important.”
Before Instacart, Simo made a name for herself as the head of Facebook at Meta, a role she held from 2019 until 2021. Originally from France, Simo was among the highest-ranking female executives at Facebook, after then-COO Sheryl Sandberg and Marne Levine, who was chief business officer.
Simo, 39, wrote in a post on X that she’ll remain CEO of Instacart for the next few months and stay on as chair after that.
“I’m so grateful to my Instacart team for the amazing ride we had together, and I look forward to supporting the next CEO during the transition,” she wrote. Earlier this week, Instacart announced Fizz, a new drink and snack delivery app for those 21 and older.
Instacart said in a statement that it will soon announce Simo’s successor and that the person will be “one of its highly talented senior executives.”
Altman said in Wednesday’s memo that he would now focus more on research, compute and safety systems. In March, OpenAI said that operating chief Brad Lightcap was expanding his role to oversee the company’s “business and day-to-day operations,” as Altman shifted his efforts to research and products. Lightcap is leading “global deployment,” with responsibility over strategy, partnerships and infrastructure, OpenAI said at the time.
OpenAI, which has for years been supported financially by Microsoft, was recently valued at $300 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Simo’s first name in the headline.
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