Thinking Machines Lab, the artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI Chief
Technology Officer Mira Murati, has raised $2 billion in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. With the new funding round, the company reached a thumping valuation of $12 billion.
Other investors who participated in the funding round include Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, and Jane Street.
This is one of the largest seed rounds in the history of Silicon Valley. While reports in June claimed the company was close to closing this $2 billion funding round at a $10 billion valuation, the valuation shot up last month.
READ: Meta recruits Safe Superintelligence CEO after failed acquisition attempt (June 20, 2025)
Murati revealed via X that the startup plans to unveil its work in the “next couple months,” and it will include a “significant open source offering.”
“Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems,” she said.
Thinking Machines Lab had attracted several of Murati’s former coworkers at OpenAI, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and Luke Metz. Murati says her company is currently trying to staff up, specifically for people with a track record of “building successful AI-driven products from the ground up,” according to the startup’s website.
Murati left OpenAI in 2024, after working there for six years. After being promoted to the executive role of a CTO in 2022, she led the company’s work on ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub’s co-pilot programming assistant. She was also briefly the interim CEO when Sam Altman was removed from the position by board members in 2024. Before OpenAI, she was a product manager at Tesla, Thinking Machines Lab’s blog lists 29 employees from OpenAI, Character AI, and Google DeepMind among other top firms.
According to reports, Meta held talks to acquire Thinking Machines Lab in order to strengthen its AI efforts. If the deal had gone through, it would have been among the long list of recent hiring and acquisition efforts by the tech giant for the purpose. Meta recently bought a 49% stake in Scale AI, and recruited Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross after a failed acquisition attempt. The company also hired a number of high-level employees from rival companies like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Apple.
READ: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati unveils new venture (February 20, 2025)
According to TechCrunch, Thinking Machines Lab is among the handful of startups investors believe to offer serious competition to leading AI model developers today, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
Previous reports indicated that the startup is paying top technical talent up to half a million dollars in salary, according to federal data obtained by Business Insider. These high salaries were provided even before the company secured its latest funding round.