OpenAI Boosts AI Adoption With Mexican Startup Partnerships

OpenAI reinforced its strategic engagement with the Mexican startup ecosystem during the AI Summit Mexico, highlighting the role of startups in advancing AI models and enabling technological co-creation.

"Startups represent a very important segment for us for three reasons: they adopt our latest technology, push our models to the limit, and provide better feedback," says Caroline McCloskey, Head of GTM-Startups, OpenAI. This approach aligns with the company’s strategy to integrate entrepreneurs directly into the product design and improvement process.

Generative capabilities, large language models (LLMs), and new computational reasoning tools are enabling a shift in operational scalability. Historically, reaching US$1 million in annual recurring revenue within 12 to 18 months marked a critical milestone for technology startups. However, AI integration is reshaping that benchmark. According to McCloskey, startups are now scaling to tens of millions of dollars within weeks, even without external financing. This phenomenon has attracted the attention of AI-focused venture capital firms active in Latin America.

This shift means small teams can achieve high productivity and operational efficiency using models like GPT-4 and its successor, GPT-4o. McCloskey notes that the ability to scale without a proportional increase in headcount is one of the most significant changes introduced by AI. The result is reduced operating costs, increased organizational agility, and accelerated development and product-launch cycles.

OpenAI’s commitment to the entrepreneurial ecosystem is reflected in investments in technical infrastructure, strategic guidance, and early access to next-generation models. These include the “O” series, a line of models optimized for advanced reasoning tasks in programming, mathematics, and problem solving. This architecture, still under active development, enables developers to build more precise and efficient solutions with applications in finance, logistics, law, and education.

OpenAI engages with startups through acceleration programs, free API access, and co-creation frameworks in which founders' feedback directly informs the company’s product roadmap, says McCloskey. This level of integration positions startups not as end users, but as strategic partners in the design and validation of emerging technologies.

A key component in this dynamic is OpenAI’s Applied Engineering team, which translates advances in fundamental research into products such as ChatGPT Enterprise and API integration tools. This team serves as the bridge between research labs and corporate users, transforming business needs into product features.

For example, by integrating generative models intensively into its operations, Kavak automated 90% of its vehicle purchasing workflow in six months, using conversational agents to execute critical operational functions, says McCloskey. This implementation has allowed the company to scale transactions and reduce sales cycles significantly.

In the coming months, OpenAI projects a significant increase in the adoption of its tools in Latin America, driven by the elimination of traditional barriers such as access to computing infrastructure or the need for large development teams. The expansion of technical support in Spanish and the creation of local communities of developers are part of the company’s strategic plan to increase the corporate user base in the region.

McCloskey says that this first formal meeting with the Mexican ecosystem marks the beginning of an ongoing stage of collaboration. "Mexico has always been at the forefront of creation and now, with AI, the barriers no longer exist," she says. The emphasis will be on identifying priority use cases in key sectors such as healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, and retail.

To maximize the impact of these collaborations, OpenAI plans to strengthen partnerships with investment funds, technical universities, and business accelerators, as well as facilitate early access to experimental versions of its new models for validation in real-world environments.