Brockman says OpenAI could be IPO-ready in 2027 after its enterprise business doubled

OpenAI could go public next year. Asked at a Wall Street Journal tech conference whether the company would be IPO-ready in 2027, president and co-founder Greg Brockman answered, "I think so. Yes," Sarah Perez reports for TechCrunch.

The rough part first

Brockman was unusually frank about how the year started. He called the first two quarters of 2026 pretty rough and admitted OpenAI wasn't even part of the conversation in agentic coding, where Anthropic's Claude Code had been winning share. OpenAI had Codex, he said, but nobody was talking about it.

Then the third quarter turned. OpenAI's annualized revenue grew 70% in a single quarter, and Brockman says the reason is that enterprise sales doubled. He framed it as the payoff of investments made earlier, not one lucky quarter.

Enterprise is now the business

The mix has flipped. Enterprise used to bring in around 30% of OpenAI's revenue; now it's the majority. Consumer revenue hasn't shrunk, Brockman stressed, it's still growing, but enterprise took off faster. He cited a recent JPMorgan Chase partnership as the kind of customer OpenAI now lands.

A year ago, he said, prospects would ask whether OpenAI was really committed to enterprise at all, because they saw it as a consumer company. His lesson from selling to businesses: help them find the milestones that matter most, earn their trust, and prove you'll be around for the long haul.

Benchmarks vs. vibes

"IPO-ready" is a feeling, not a filing. Brockman gave no date, no valuation and no revenue figure beyond growth rates, and a 70% jump means more when you know the starting point. Still, the shape of the story is worth noticing: the company that made AI a consumer habit now says its future is selling to companies, and that it got there by catching up on coding agents.

For developers, that's the useful signal. The fight between Codex and Claude Code is now a fight over the largest chunk of OpenAI's revenue, which means more investment in coding tools, more aggressive enterprise pricing and plenty more announcements aimed at your team lead.

Scoreboard update: AI +1. OpenAI says its enterprise AI business doubled in a quarter and an IPO could follow in 2027.

Stay undead.