OpenAI Debuts $4B AI Services Company As Rival Anthropic Builds Its Own

‘AI is becoming capable of doing increasingly meaningful work inside organizations,’ says Denise Dresser, chief revenue officer of OpenAI.

OpenAI has revealed its own artificial intelligence services company backed by a $4 billion-plus initial investment, following on the heels of a similar announcement by AI rival Anthropic as both vendors invest in channel partner programs.

Building the foundation for the services company–named the OpenAI Deployment Co.–is the pending acquisition of London-based applied AI consulting and engineering firm Tomoro, OpenAI said in a statement Monday. More acquisitions are planned. Financial terms for the Tomoro acquisition were not disclosed.

Investors in the new company include Capgemini–No. 4 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–and fellow consulting and system integration giants Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co.

“AI is becoming capable of doing increasingly meaningful work inside organizations,” Denise Dresser, chief revenue officer of San Francisco-based OpenAI, said in a statement Monday. “The challenge now is helping companies integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that power their businesses. DeployCo is designed to help organizations bridge that gap and turn AI capability into real operational impact.”

OpenAI Launches $4B ‘DeployCo’ AI Services Venture

CRN has reached out to OpenAI, Bain, Capgemini and for comment.

OpenAI and Anthropic have been making efforts to grow their partner ecosystems this year. OpenAI hired Colleen Kapase, who has overseen aggressive channel charges at Google Cloud and Snowflake, for a top channel post. And Anthropic recently revealed its Claude Partner Network with an initial $100 million investment and a new certification program.

At the same time as these AI juggernauts invest in the channel, a rivalry is emerging between traditional solution providers and born-in-AI solution provider upstarts.

Traditional solution providers have told CRN in recent interviews that they bring better and more secure AI outcomes to customers through a better understanding of business processes and workflows built over years–sometimes decades.

Russell Goodenough, senior vice president and AI lead for the U.K. and Australia for Montreal-based CGI–No. 13 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500 and a partner of both Anthropic and OpenAI–told CRN in an interview that unlike these born-in-AI solution providers, CGI brings the trust and security large enterprises and back-office operations lean on for AI at scale–not to mention avoiding vendor lock-in and expensive, inefficient migrations based on the customer’s existing IT estate.

CGI wants to beat upstart born-in-AI solution providers to the punch in some of workplace AI’s biggest use cases, like leveraging AI for a modernized version of complex enterprise resource planning systems, for example.

“We want to be the first organization that's attempting to do that sort of work, to replace an ERP,” Goodenough said. ‘We want to be the first organizations to prove that it can be done in a trustworthy, dependable way, not just practiced at a hackathon.”

Plus, the demand for workplace AI is so great that traditional solution providers and upstarts can carve their own spaces in the market, Goodenough said.

Born-in-AI solution provider upstarts have positioned themselves as capable of moving faster than traditional services providers and possessing an employee base that is better versed in the emerging technology.

Smaller born-in-AI solution providers–not just ones with vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI at the helm–have also attracted investor attention this year. For example, Treeline recently won over storied venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with its AI-powered services strategy and closed a $25 million Series A round of funding led by a16z.

“We are building something very unique very quickly,” Treeline CEO Peter Doyle told CRN in an interview after the Series A announcement.

How OpenAI’s DeployCo Will Work With Enterprises

The new OpenAI services company aims to help customers build and deploy AI systems in the workplace. DeployCo will work to embed forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) specialized in frontier AI deployment into organizations to apply AI to complex problems in demanding environments, the vendor said Monday.

OpenAI pledged that DeployCo will work alongside its Frontier Alliance partner ecosystem and the broader consulting industry for AI adoption and change management.

These engineers will work with customer business leaders, operators and frontline teams to identify where AI will have the biggest outcomes. They will also redesign organizational infrastructure and redesign critical workflows to create durable systems.

Who’s Backing OpenAI’s DeployCo: TPG, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs

DeployCo comprises OpenAI and 19 investment firms, consultancies and system integrators, according to OpenAI. TPG is an investment firm leading the partnership. Advent, Brookfield and the investment wing of Bain are co-lead founding partners. B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp., Warburg Pincus and WCAS are founding partners in DeployCo.

Goldman Sachs, notably, is also backing Anthropic’s services firm.

Brookfield disclosed Monday that it is investing $500 million into DeployCo. Anuj Ranjan, CEO of Brookfield’s private equity business, said in a statement Monday that the firm has already seen productivity gains from AI applications across its portfolio and is investing in DeployCo to further scale AI adoption.

“Artificial intelligence will be a defining driver of productivity across the backbone of the global economy,” Ranjan said.

The private equity sponsors of DeployCo can leverage their portfolio companies for early AI transformation use cases, according to OpenAI.

“AI-driven enterprise transformation represents one of the most compelling growth opportunities in technology today, driven by rapid progress in LLMs and increasing organizational demand for tools that integrate AI into core systems and workflows,” TPG CEO Jon Winkelried said in a statement Monday. “DeployCo is addressing this need at scale, and we’re proud to partner with OpenAI to help unlock AI’s full value.”

DeployCo is a standalone business unit with OpenAI as majority owner and controller. DeployCo operates as an extension of OpenAI to keep customers closely connected to its research, product and in-house deployment teams, according to the vendor. DeployCo engineers will have a roadmap for future OpenAI capabilities through models, tools and deployment patterns.

The $4 billion initial investment will go toward scaling operations and acquiring more companies beyond Tomoro. The Tomoro consulting firm OpenAI plans to acquire will bring about 150 FDEs and deployment specialists into DeployCo. Tomoro counts among its customers Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Supercell. OpenAI plans to close the acquisition “in the coming months.”

In Tomoro’s own announcement Monday on the acquisition, the solution provider said that joining OpenAI increases its ambition to help organizations move from OpenAI access to production-ready AI deployments.

“As part of Deployment Company, we’ll be able to do this with a much bigger canvas,” according to the announcement.

Tomoro Director Ash Garner co-founded Tomoro in 2023 after about five years with Accenture and Mudano, according to his LinkedIn account. Accenture acquired Mudano in 2020. Garner departed Accenture with the title of generative AI lead for the banking industry in Europe.

DeployCo engagements with clients will start with AI diagnostics to find the biggest possible outcomes, a small number of priority workflows, then a phase for designing, building, testing and deploying production systems.

Those systems will connect OpenAI models to customer data, tools, controls and business processes, according to the vendor.

OpenAI: DeployCo Sponsors Reach Thousands Of Businesses

In OpenAI’s announcement of DeployCo, the vendor revealed that more than 1 million businesses have adopted OpenAI’s products and application programming interface (APIs).

DeployCo’s investment and consulting partners sponsor more than 2,000 businesses around the world, according to OpenAI. Consulting and integrator partners add “many thousands more” to the count.

Earlier this month, Anthropic revealed that it plans to form an AI services company of its own while still investing in solution providers. The San Francisco-based Claude maker is forming this AI services company to work with midsize customers across industries to introduce the AI tool into operations. Anthropic is forming the new company with financial giants Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, with a consortium of alternative asset managers backing the company.

Multiple news outlets have reported that the new company has a total financial commitment of about $1.5 billion. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman will invest around $300 million each. Goldman Sachs will invest about $150 million.