Walnut Creek-based Solvd, Inc. just picked up a credential that matters more than it might look like from the outside: Select Partner status in the OpenAI Partner Network, the program OpenAI launched in June 2026 backed by $150 million.
The network is designed to bring together partners with the technical expertise, delivery capabilities, and customer relationships needed to help enterprises deploy OpenAI technology.
Solvd isn’t a small operation trying to punch above its weight. It has backing from private equity firm Siguler Guff and has spent the past year buying its way deeper into AI research, picking up Tooploox in June 2025 and enterprise consultancy EastBanc Technologies not long after.
Its chief scientist, Tomasz Trzciński, co-authored a paper on self-supervised reinforcement learning that won Best Paper at NeurIPS 2025, one of the field’s most prominent research conferences.
What the OpenAI partnership gives Solvd is a louder way to say something it has apparently been telling clients for a while: the advantage in enterprise AI is not simply access to a model, but the engineering work required to make that model usable inside a specific company’s systems.
According to a press release, the firm breaks that work into three stages:
- An engineering baseline covering tests and architectural readiness;
- a production phase where the client’s engineers and QA staff build confidence working with agents day to day;
- and a final stage where results are measured against numbers agreed upon upfront rather than vague promises about efficiency.
There’s a reason that pitch lands right now. McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI research found that 89% of organizations now use AI, underscoring how quickly adoption has moved beyond experimentation.
But CIO.com’s 2026 State of the CIO survey found that just 19% of respondents said their AI initiatives had met or exceeded business goals.
That’s the gap consulting and engineering shops are racing to fill.
Smartling, a smaller localization software company, also reached Select status, showing that the program extends beyond the largest consulting firms.
Solvd says its OpenAI work will run through fintech, banking, retail, ecommerce, and hospitality clients, industries where it has built years of engineering relationships and where the pressure to turn AI investment into measurable business results continues to grow.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
