Clearlake Capital Partners with OpenAI to Scale AI Across Portfolio
Clearlake Capital Group has formed a strategic partnership with OpenAI aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence adoption across the firm’s more than 50 portfolio companies.
The collaboration will provide portfolio companies with access to GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work, which can use files, plugins and approved tools to complete multistep workflows. Clearlake AI Labs, the firm’s in-house AI team, will help management teams evaluate opportunities, prioritize use cases and make build-or-buy decisions. The team will also support implementation across products, internal operations and customer-facing.
“We believe AI represents one of the most significant technology shifts of our generation and a powerful opportunity to create value across industries,” said Prashant Mehrotra, a partner and managing director at Clearlake.
Clearlake noted early traction at portfolio company Alteryx, where OpenAI tools have expanded beyond engineering teams. Legal staff now use ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to negotiate contracts and flag AI-related risks, while more than half of Alteryx’s engineering staff have adopted Codex CLI.
The OpenAI partnership builds on Clearlake’s broader technology push. In July, the firm announced a collaboration with Databricks and West Monroe to build a unified data platform.
Clearlake’s move reflects a broader trend among alternative asset managers embedding frontier AI labs directly into their platforms. In May, Anthropic partnered with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman to launch Ode with Anthropic, an enterprise AI services venture. OpenAI followed with its own deployment vehicle, the OpenAI Deployment Company, backed by $4 billion from investors including TPG, Brookfield and Goldman Sachs.
Clearlake, founded in 2006, manages more than $185 billion in assets and recently closed its eighth flagship fund at $14.8 billion, with AI-driven transformation cited as a core investment theme.
