OpenAI hires Cursor’s Europe chief, its second sales hire from SpaceX

OpenAI has hired Ismail Elmas, who ran Cursor’s business in Europe, as its vice president of sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

He is the second sales executive OpenAI has taken from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns Cursor, in the past month.

The German business daily Handelsblatt first reported the news on Thursday morning, October 8. OpenAI confirmed the hire to Handelsblatt, which carried comments from Elmas and his new boss.

Elmas will be based in Munich, according to Handelsblatt, and all of OpenAI’s sales staff across the region will report to him. The firm plans to sharply grow its sales team in Europe, the paper said.

Cursor is the AI coding firm that SpaceX bought for $60bn in a deal that closed on August 14. In June, as Cursor’s senior vice president for EMEA, Elmas told Reuters the firm would open a London head office and grow its local team to about 200 people.

Before Cursor, he spent more than 20 years at software and security firms. He joined data security firm Rubrik in 2023 to lead its business outside the US, after four years at Zscaler.

“OpenAI has changed the way people work and how companies operate,” Elmas told Handelsblatt.

Brian McCarthy, OpenAI’s vice president of worldwide sales, told the paper that Elmas would help firms get real value from new tech. McCarthy also came from SpaceX. He had been president of global revenue at Cursor and moved to SpaceX when the deal closed.

McCarthy reports to Dali Rajic, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, who started on August 24 after two sales leaders quit. Both hires also follow OpenAI’s decision to stop supplying Cursor with its models, with access ending on November 12.

OpenAI wants a bigger presence in Europe as it chases business clients and ad sales ahead of a possible stock market listing.