OpenAI has set its sights firmly on the startup community. Just last week, during a Y Combinator event in San Francisco, Sam Altman offered $2 million worth of tokens to each startup in the spring and summer batches in exchange for equity.
Altman’s announcement comes the same week as the company appointed Laura Modiano as its inaugural Founder Experience lead. According to Modiano, who attended the Y Combinator event, the founder experience team will be “focused on helping founders move fast,” and providing them with support across all growth stages.
The new team will work with startup founders to provide resources and support to help them better leverage OpenAI products. It highlights that the company isn’t just courting the enterprise market, but a new wave of AI-first companies and founders too.
Introducing The Founder Experience Team
The path to finding value from AI isn’t always simple. As MIT’s widely cited study found in 2025, 95% of AI initiatives fail to deliver a measurable ROI. OpenAI’s move to work closer alongside the startup community represents an attempt to help support third party companies get better value from their AI investments.
In a video interview, Modiano shared some initial details about the newly formed Founder Experience team. “This is an effort that we want to put proper resourcing behind, so that we can truly be helpful to founders everywhere.”
“As a team and as a company, we really see the potential and the value of what startups can do,” Modiano said. “We want to be able to support them in multiple ways and to create value in a range of ways that create opportunity.”
Modiano shared that she has been working with OpenAI for the past two years, working with startups and founders across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. While Modiano is based in the UK, she also travels to the U.S. regularly. Despite her presence in the UK, she says that the founder experience team itself will be a global function.
Although she said plans were still being finalized in terms of the expected number of team members, she noted this isn’t a one person or five person job. She also confirmed that there will be teams distributed globally.
Plans For The Future
As Modiano moves into the new role, the founder team is still being defined, not just in terms of its team members but also with regard to its entire operation. Currently, the program aims to provide a “very live feedback loop,” that will be shaped based on the feedback of startup founders. At this stage in the initiative’s lifecycle, the challenge is to define what support founders need.
“I think companies often build with a plan of ‘that’s what we need to do’. We’re trying to flip the script and actually listen to founders, listen to what their needs are and build it for them as they need it,” Modiano said.
OpenAI plans to have a couple of staff members out in the community while internal team members performing tasks including program management, engineering, communications and marketing. The company is also considering how to help startups with hiring, community building and identifying the right talent.
Modiano also says she thinks there is an opportunity to do more for founders, whether that’s building tools or creating self-service resources or packaging other offerings OpenAI has. This suggests that there is the potential for the program to inform OpenAI releases in the future.
At its core, the Founder Experience team appears to be an effort to make OpenAI’s products and services more accessible to startups. With many startups using multiple AI models, including open source tools like DeepSeek and proprietary tools like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI is under tremendous pressure to differentiate itself, and greater collaboration with startups is one way to do that.
“OpenAI must respond to the competitive pressures it faces in cultivating a builder community. These companies have other options, including open weight models that they can use to power their intelligence layer,” Brian Jackson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, an IT consulting firm, told me via email.
“OpenAI is trying to create a compelling value proposition to builders that if they choose OpenAI, then they will not only get the best-in-class model, but also the community, support, and relationships that lead to success,” Jackson said.
A Big Win For The UK
Given the program has only just been formed, it remains to be seen what type of results it’s going to deliver long term. In any case, the formation of this team appears to be a big win for the UK tech sector. Although is a global team, the fact that team lead will be located in London will undoubtedly offer advantages to local startups.
“Theoretically we should be listening to everyone, but practically, because I live in London, because I’m interacting with the London founder community, a lot of the initial ideas and the drive to build this team…and how we went about building it was from a lot of feedback and needs that we heard from UK founders,” Modiano said.
It’s worth noting that the team was founded just after OpenAI and Anthropic announced office expansions in London, and after the UK government unveiled the Sovereign AI Fund which will offer £500 million in investment to selected startups.
Moriano did say that founders everywhere will have an equal voice under the initiative, but at the very least, her leading this team from London has the potential to provide a significant boost to the local startup community.
More broadly, the fact that one of the world’s largest AI startups is establishing a new team to interact with the startup community, highlights a shift towards developing AI for builders needs, rather than one-size-fits-all proprietary solutions. Such approaches could define the next generation of AI tools not just for startups, but enterprises too.
Updated May 26, 2026 with a comment from Brian Jackson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.
