Get hired by OpenAI without applying 🪴
OpenAI bought 9 companies in 5 months. Here's exactly what they were buying.
For years, the dream career move in tech was simple: get hired by the best company you could.
You polished the CV. You ground through the interviews. You waited for the offer.
The harder the company was to get into, the more it meant.
OpenAI and Anthropic sit at the top of that pile now. The labs everyone wants in. But the smartest people I know aren’t actually applying for the roles.
They found a different door to get in.
They’re building the thing the labs can’t help but buy.
Not to scale. Not to IPO. Built, very deliberately, to get acquired by the exact companies they’d happily work for. Inside a year or two, ideally.
Sounds backwards. Then you see how the labs actually buy.
Because it turns out there’s three things a lab acquires startups for:
📊 Data
Are you sitting on something the labs can’t get anywhere else?
Proprietary, high signal, hard to replicate. The kind of dataset that takes years and real-world access to build, not a scrape.
It’s why Anthropic bought Humanloop. For the evaluation data and the enterprise eval workflows that came with it.
🏆 Talent
Have you assembled a team so good it’s worth billions to just absorb. Not a good team. A team where every single person would clear the bar at the lab on their own.
That’s rare. And genuinely hard to fake.
It’s why Anthropic bought Vercept, a two-year-old dev startup.
They’re not buying the product at that point. They’re investing in people and saving eighteen months of recruiting (and probably a significant sum of money as well).
🤝 Distribution
Do you have enterprise customers who trust you, or millions of people who’ll follow you wherever you go?
The model layer is commoditising fast. The hard part now isn’t building the AI. It’s getting it inside the messy, specific workflows companies actually run on.
It’s why OpenAI agreed to buy Tomoro, an applied AI consultancy out of Edinburgh with 150 engineers already embedded inside Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Red Bull.
Relationships generate switching costs that no competing model can erode.
Hit two of those three and you’re a serious target. Nail all three and they come to you.
OpenAI’s acquisitions in 2026:
January 2026
Convogo, a GenAI consulting firm.
Torch, a healthcare app for unifying medical records.
Crixet, a LaTeX editing and collaboration tool
February 2026
OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent.
March 2026
Promptfoo, a cybersecurity startup for testing AI applications.
Astral, the open-source Python toolmaker,.
April 2026
TBPN, the new-media company behind a popular long-form daily tech show.
Hiro Finance, an AI personal-CFO platform for financial planning.
May 2026
Tomoro, an applied AI consulting firm with around 150 engineers, founding piece of the new $4B Deployment Company
Anthropic’s acquisitions in 2026:
February 2026
Vercept, an AI computer-use startup acquired to push Claude’s computer-use capabilities.
April 2026
Coefficient Bio, a stealth biotech AI startup.
May 2026
Stainless, the SDK generation platform that builds developer libraries for OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare.
Andrej Karpathy (worth 20 startups).
Same underlying bet across the board: the fastest way to get a capability is to buy the people who already have it.
OpenAI made nearly as many acquisitions in the first five months of 2026 as it did in all of last year. Anthropic has told its bankers it’s gearing up to buy more.
The old career ladder said: be the best applicant.
The new one says: be the best acquisition.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a much bigger story hidden underneath.
How do founders deliberately build the data, the team and the distribution that makes a lab reach for its chequebook?
I’m turning this into a deep dive series. One company acquisition at a time, pulled apart with real examples.
Tomoro’s breakdown dropping new week. Subscribe not to miss it.
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