OpenAI hires Brian McCarthy from SpaceX as its VP of worldwide gross sales

McCarthy joined SpaceX in August through its acquisition of Cursor. At both companies he served as the president of global revenue and worldwide field operations. He previously led enterprise sales teams at Rubrik, ThoughtSpot, AppDyanamics, and Qlik.

He is the first major hire by Dali Rajic, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer who started less than a month ago on Aug. 24. This is a newly created position and McCarthy will not be replacing anyone.

Rajic has also recruited two sales executives from the AI data company Snowflake, according to a source familiar. That includes Mark Fleming, Snowflake’s SVP of enterprise sales, and Jaime Patel, Snowflake’s VP of enterprise sales engineering for North America. They did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

McCarthy reported to Rajic when two worked together at AppDynamics from 2017-2018, when Rajic was chief revenue officer and McCarthy was vice president of sales. Both were on the team as AppDynamics prepared to go public, but then Cisco swooped in to purchase it a day before the planned listing.

“Brian combines a deep commitment to customers with a belief in what technology can do for people,” Rajic said in an OpenAI LinkedIn post. “I’m excited to partner with him as we scale our business, help enterprises transform, and bring the benefits of AI to more people around the world.”

McCarthy will work with Rajic to build out the sales team, and to scale and accelerate enterprise growth, including overseas, OpenAI said. Corporate adoption of frontier AI models has been a key battleground for OpenAI and rival Anthropic, and an important revenue stream for OpenAI as it moves closer to an IPO, expected sometime next year. Despite the widespread adoption of Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI has clawed back some ground here in recent months, and as of this week its latest Astra model eclipsed Anthropic’s Fable model in enterprise spend, according to data from Ramp.

In his LinkedIn post announcing the news, McCarthy said he was drawn to the role because he shares the vision held by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, co-founder and president Greg Brockman, and Rajic about enterprise adoption.

“AI should help people solve hard problems, do more than they thought possible, and create new opportunities,” McCarthy wrote. “With technology this powerful, we have a responsibility to get it right. For me, that means helping customers use it safely, keeping people in control, and making sure as many people as possible benefit.”