April brought major leadership losses for OpenAI. In a single day, Sam Altman’s artificial intelligence startup suffered a significant shakeup as three senior executives announced their departures from the company. One of those tech veterans was Kevin Weil, the vice president of OpenAI for Science.
Weil, who has served in numerous roles across tech giants Twitter, Meta and Planet Labs in addition to OpenAI, has now switched paths and joined the board of Stoke Space, a Seattle startup building reusable rockets led by CEO Andy Lapsa.
The well-funded company, positioning itself as a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, raised an additional $350 million in February 2026, extending a Series D funding round it closed in October. According to SpaceNews.com, Stoke Space has raised $1.34 billion to date. Ironically, the rapidly rising startup also shares a connection with the CEO of the very AI company former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil left months ago.
Former OpenAI executive announces new career move
Sharing the positive update in a social media post, Kevin Weil announced, “Super excited to be joining the @stokespace board!”
Shedding light on his ongoing conversations with the company’s CEO and the need to invest in the space industry, he wrote on X, “I’ve known Andy since their seed round.”
“Every month, like clockwork, he’d send an investor update with an impressive-looking bullet list of what they were going to get done that month,” he went on. “At the end of the month, the next update would show each of those bullets crossed out done—rarely they might miss one, and it would come with an ETA—and a list of what they’d get done the next month.”
Super excited to be joining the @stoke_space board! 🚀
— Kevin Weil 🇺🇸 (@kevinweil) July 8, 2026
I've known Andy since their seed round (thx @beller). Every month, like clockwork, he'd send an investor update with an impressive-looking bullet list of what they were going to get done that month. At the end of the month,…
Weil added, “Like clockwork, month after month after month. Andy, Tom, and the team are machines and it’s been so impressive to watch them execute.”
In light of SpaceX’s historic stock market debut in June that drove the company’s valuation to over $2 trillion, Weil went on to praise Elon Musk’s rocket maker for setting a record-setting precedent. Hailing space as being “critical to the future of humanity,” Weil noted, “I’ve watched @SpaceX in awe, and we should all be excited by how vibrant today’s space ecosystem is.”
Looking forward to his time as a board member of the Seattle startup cofounded in 2020, he concluded the post: “We need far more access to space than we have today. We need full reusability, which Stoke has been single-mindedly focused on since the start. And much more beyond this. Can’t wait to help accelerate the @stoke_space mission any way I can!”
Addressing the former OpenAI executive’s big space leap, Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa recounted his meeting with Weil during the company’s early days.
“It’s real simple for me,” he told TechCrunch. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to fundraise. I had no idea how Silicon Valley worked. I had no network. Kevin [an early investor in the company with his wife Elizabeth, through their fund Scribble Ventures] comes with all of that background and was able to help me think about fundraising and getting the company off the ground.”
Former OpenAI exec has joined a company Altman once set his eyes on
According to a December 2025 WSJ report, Stoke Space happens to be the same space startup that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had once hoped to acquire or partner with in a bid to ramp up his competition with rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The potential proposals involved OpenAI reportedly making a series of equity investments in the company and scoring a controlling stake in the process. However, people close to OpenAI eventually told the US news outlet that the talks had died down over time.
Kevin Weil’s OpenAI journey
Weil joined the Sam Altman-led company in 2024, initially serving as the chief product officer before launching OpenAI for Science the following year.
According to a LinkedIn post, the new division sought to “build the next great scientific instrument: an AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery.” The team was behind the AI-powered platform Prism’s birth.
He announced his exit from the company on a Friday in April, the same day Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B Applications at OpenAI, and Bill Peebles, who led OpenAI’s defunct video app Sora, left the firm.
“It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science,” he wrote at the time.
OpenAI for Science’s former VP’s exit came a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery. His departure also, in a way, marked the team’s independent identity as he revealed OpenAI for Science was “being decentralised into other research teams.”
A month before Weil quit his OpenAI leadership role, The Wall Street Journal reported that the AI company’s top executives were finalising plans to cut back on side projects, including Sora and OpenAI for Science, as part of a strategic shift to refocus the company around coding and business users.