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Ex-company founders

Ex-OpenAI founders: 24 people who left OpenAI to start companies

24 people who founded or worked at OpenAI went on to found 50 companies, including Aravind Srinivas, Barret Zoph, Chris Olah, Daniel Levy and 20 others.

About OpenAI → Lineage tree: The OpenAI Diaspora →

Founders who came from OpenAI

24
Aravind Srinivas
American artificial intelligence company
Went on to found
Perplexity AI 2022
Went on to found
Thinking Machines Lab 2025
Chris Olah
Canadian machine learning researcher (born 1991 or 1992)
Went on to found
Anthropic 2021
Daniela Amodei
American entrepreneur (born 1987)
Went on to found
Anthropic 2021
Dario Amodei
American AI entrepreneur (born 1983)
Went on to found
Anthropic 2021
Went on to found
Adept 2022 Adept AI 2022
Elon Musk
Businessman (born 1971)
Went on to found
xAI 2023 SpaceXAI 2023 River AI
Ilya Sutskever
Computer scientist (born 1986)
Went on to found
Anthropic 2021
Jared Kaplan
Theoretical physicist and artificial intelligence researcher
Went on to found
Anthropic 2021
John Schulman
American computer scientist
Went on to found
Thinking Machines Lab 2025
Mira Murati
Albanian-American business executive
Went on to found
Thinking Machines Lab 2025
Went on to found
Covariant 2017
Pieter Abbeel
Machine learning researcher at Berkeley
Went on to found
Covariant 2017 Gradescope
Went on to found
Covariant 2017
Sam Altman
American entrepreneur and investor (born 1985)
Went on to found
Anthropic 2021
Went on to found
Covariant 2017
Went on to found
Cresta 2017 Recursive
Went on to found
SolidStage 2012 Anthropic 2021
Went on to found
Anthropic 2021
Trevor Blackwell
American programmer
Went on to found
Anybots 2001
How this list is built. A person appears here if they founded or worked at OpenAI and later founded at least one other company in the graph. Missing someone? Add them.