OpenAI president says company could be IPO-ready in 2027 as enterprise sales surge

OpenAI points to 2027 for a public listing

OpenAI could be ready to go public in 2027, according to company president and co-founder Greg Brockman. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal technology conference this week, Brockman was asked whether the company would be prepared for an initial public offering next year and replied, "I think so. Yes." He added that OpenAI wants to list when the timing suits the business, and said his confidence in the company has never been higher after the progress made this year.

TechCrunch, which reported the remarks, notes that Brockman has been promoting OpenAI's gains in the enterprise market — a segment where rival Anthropic moved earlier and built a strong position.

Enterprise is now the majority of revenue

The core of Brockman's pitch was a shift in where OpenAI's money comes from. According to TechCrunch, he said the company recorded 70% quarterly growth in annualized revenue in the third quarter, and attributed most of it to the enterprise side of the business doubling.

That pushed enterprise past the halfway mark: it now represents the majority of OpenAI's revenue, compared with roughly 30% previously. Brockman stressed that consumer revenue has not shrunk — it is still growing — but the enterprise segment is what took off. He pointed to a recent partnership with JPMorgan Chase as an example of the kind of customer OpenAI is now winning.

A difficult first half of the year

Brockman was candid about the start of 2026, describing the first two quarters as rough. He also conceded that OpenAI was effectively absent from the conversation around agentic coding, a category where Anthropic's Claude Code has gained significant market share. OpenAI had its own coding product in Codex, but as Brockman put it, hardly anyone was discussing it; the company chose to keep building rather than chase attention.

He framed the third-quarter growth not as the result of a single quarter's work but as the payoff of investments accumulated over the preceding period.

Learning to sell to large organizations

Brockman also reflected on what selling into the enterprise has taught the company. The job, as he described it, is to help customers identify the most meaningful milestones they can reach with AI, build trust through delivery, and demonstrate that OpenAI will be a dependable partner over the long term.

A year ago, he said, OpenAI was perceived primarily as a consumer company, and prospective customers openly questioned whether it was committed to the enterprise. That perception, in his telling, has changed.

Why it matters

An OpenAI listing would be one of the most closely watched public debuts in tech, and Brockman's comments are the clearest signal yet of a timeline. The revenue mix shift matters as much as the headline number: recurring enterprise contracts are generally valued more highly than consumer subscriptions because they are stickier and less exposed to churn, and a majority-enterprise OpenAI would be judged quite differently by public-market investors than the consumer-first company it was a year ago.

The remarks also sharpen the competitive picture with Anthropic, which had become the enterprise favorite and the leader in agentic coding. If the third-quarter trajectory holds, that gap is narrowing.

One caveat: being IPO-ready is not the same as committing to a listing. Brockman explicitly tied any offering to "the right time for us," leaving the company room to wait. Still, for the first time, OpenAI has put a year on it.