OpenAI’s former sales leader joins VC firm Acrew: OpenAI taught her where startups can build a ‘moat’

Summary

OpenAI’s first sales leader, Aliisa Rosenthal, has found a new career: venture capital. She’s joining Acrew Capital as a general partner, working alongside founding partner Lauren Kolodny and the firm’s other partners, Rosenthal and Kolodny tell TechCrunch. Rosenthal left OpenAI about eight months ago after a three-year sprint at the AI lab that saw the launch of DALL·E, ChatGPT, ChatGPT Enterprise, Sora, and other products. “I wasn’t initially looking to join a VC fund,” she told TechCrunch. “I was out there meeting with lots of AI startups.” But after growing OpenAI’s enterprise sales team from two people to hundreds, she saw the appeal when Kolodny pitched her on venture capital. Instead of helping one startup with its go-to-market strategy, she could help a portfolio of them. In her time at OpenAI, “I learned a lot about behavior, both on the side of the buyers, how people are thinking about these purchases, and the gap between what most organizations think is possible and what they can actually deploy today,” she said. For instance, she has firsthand insight into what kind of moat an AI startup can build that won’t leave it vulnerable when model makers like OpenAI launch competing products. Will OpenAI “just build everything and put every company out of business? You know, they are doing a lot already: they’re in consumer, they’re in enterprise, they’re building a device. I don’t think they are going to go after every potential enterprise application,” she says. So one moat is for enterprise AI startups to offer specialization. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 Context as moat Additionally, she thinks the key to a good startup moat will be “context” — or the information the AI stores in its context window memory as it works on requests. “Context is dynamic. It’s adaptable. It’s scalable. And I think what we’re seeing is going beyond sort of the basic RAG towards this idea of a context graph, which is persistent,” she says referring to Retriev...