OpenAI president Greg Brockman says the company could IPO in 2027

The question for a buyer of AI software has always been what the vendor's books look like. TechCrunch reports that OpenAI president Greg Brockman said the company could be ready to go public in 2027. He said it at the Wall Street Journal tech conference on 5 November 2026.

The moderator asked whether OpenAI could be IPO-ready next year. Brockman said: "I think so. Yes." He then added, per TechCrunch, that OpenAI has been "very clear this year" about wanting to go public. The timing, he said, is "when we feel is the right time for us". He also said he feels "extremely good about the business".

Three numbers from the stage

TechCrunch reports three figures from Brockman, all attributed to OpenAI. The company's annualised revenue grew 70 percent in the third quarter of 2026. Enterprise revenue doubled in the same quarter. Enterprise is now the majority of OpenAI's total revenue, up from about 30 percent before. None of these is an audited figure. TechCrunch gives no total dollar amount, no customer count and no valuation.

Brockman named JPMorgan Chase as an enterprise customer, as an example of the shift. He said rival Anthropic had "already successfully made inroads" in the enterprise market, especially through Claude Code. That line is TechCrunch's paraphrase of Brockman's statement at the conference.

What a near-term IPO would change

A public OpenAI would have to publish numbers that teams building on its models today cannot see. Gross margin on model serving. Compute cost per API call. Enterprise contract terms. The exposure to any single data centre deal. All four are opaque today and all four would sit in an S-1.

For a buyer of AI software, the immediate change is smaller. Nothing OpenAI said at the conference changes a current price or a model's availability. The signal is about where OpenAI thinks it will be a year from now. A team that already runs on OpenAI's API should keep doing what it was doing. A team that was weighing a multi-year commitment can read the IPO signal two ways. OpenAI wants to show growth to the market, which argues for stable pricing and strong customer retention. Or it will optimise for revenue, which could mean fewer discounts and tighter free tiers.

Brockman gave no date and no trigger. "I think so" is the whole commitment. OpenAI has told reporters the same thing in substance for most of 2026, and the company is still private. An employer, investor or buyer should treat the 2027 window as a signal of intent, not a schedule.

Source

TechCrunch, "OpenAI president Greg Brockman says company could be IPO ready in 2027".