OpenAI hires first marketing chief from Coinbase

OpenAI has hired its first chief marketing officer, nabbing Kate Rouch from crypto company Coinbase.

Rouch joined Coinbase in August 2021 to lead global marketing and public relations, and oversaw the company's Super Bowl ads. Before that, she spent more than 11 years at Meta, including a role as global head of brand and product marketing for Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook.

Rouch said in a post on X that she begins on Monday.

OpenAI's valuation has climbed to $157 billion in the two years since it launched ChatGPT, raising about $13 billion from Microsoft along the way. The company closed its latest $6.6 billion round in October and also received a $4 billion revolving line of credit.

OpenAI, which kicked off the generative artificial intelligence boom, hasn't prioritized strategic marketing to date and still says it's managed to reach 250 million weekly active users and over 1 million paying business customers.

But with the generative AI arms race heating up, OpenAI's latest hire is an indication that it plans to invest in marketing. OpenAI confirmed to CNBC that the company has no current plans to debut a Super Bowl ad in 2025.

OpenAI faces competition from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, as well as from tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. They're all battling for a bigger slice of a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Last week OpenAI said it will allow employees to sell about $1.5 billion worth of shares in a new tender offer to SoftBank.

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