OpenAI Expands Israeli Market Presence Without Opening Local Office

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant behind ChatGPT, does not have a development center or direct business operations in Israel and has historically overlooked the Israeli market. Unlike its competitor Anthropic, which employs a local representative in Ireland to develop the Israeli market, OpenAI is now enhancing its engagement with Israel remotely through representatives based in Europe. These representatives aim to integrate OpenAI’s AI models into Israeli startups and promote its autonomous code generator, Codex, among local developers.

Contrary to reports, OpenAI has no plans to open an office or hire a dedicated manager solely for Israel. The company’s expansion in Europe and the Middle East, including Israel, is led by Tricia Troth, formerly of Amazon Web Services (AWS), who is working with venture capital firms and local tech players to understand market needs. Troth recently led an online workshop for Israeli startups in collaboration with Amazon and OpenAI. She recruited Eliran Ben-David, an Israeli based in London, to support startups across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in adopting OpenAI’s tools on AWS’s Bedrock platform.

OpenAI is accelerating its business sector efforts, offering products such as the GPT 5.6 language models, ChatGPT Work AI agents, and the Codex code generator, competing with Anthropic’s offerings. Despite generating $25 billion in revenue by mid-2023 and projecting $41.3 billion for the year, OpenAI remains unprofitable with a net loss forecast of $14 billion. The company postponed its planned $1 trillion valuation IPO to next year and relies on financial backing, including a $250 billion guarantee from Nvidia to fund server farms.

Anthropic is gaining ground in the enterprise AI market, increasing its market share from 12% to 32%, while OpenAI’s share dropped from 50% to 25%. In autonomous code generation, Anthropic holds 42% market share, double that of OpenAI’s 21%. OpenAI’s business development team largely consists of former AWS personnel, reflecting its strategy to leverage cloud partnerships for growth in the Israeli and regional markets.