By Shubhangi Chowdhury
Former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI Mira Murati has raised $2 billion for her newly founded AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, valuing the venture at $10 billion. This comes in just after six months of launching it.
According to The Financial Times, this funding round is one of the largest in Silicon Valley’s history, led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Sarah Guo’s Conviction Partners. Business Insider further reported that the investors had to commit at least $50 million to take part in the funding round. Earlier media coverage had suggested the startup is aiming for a to raise more than $2 billion in venture funding round.
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Thinking Machines Lab has yet to launch a product, the scale of its funding reflects the immense interest and confidence currently surrounding AI startups. With a high- profile lineup of AI researchers from OpenAI and other leading AI companies joining the startup, it’s a deal based on the experiences these key professionals bring to the table. One of the major hires is John Schulman, cofounder of OpenAI and former head of alignment who has now joined Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist. This marks his second move within a year, after a briefly stint at Anthropic in August 2024.
Another notable addition to the team is Barret Zoph, a researcher who left OpenAI on the same day as Murati in September 2024. Other notable hires include Jonathan Lachman (Former OpenAI Head of Special Projects), Alexander Kirillov (worked on ChatGPT’s voice mode), Barret Zoph (Former Vice President, Research of OpenAI) and few other researchers and engineers from DeepMind, Meta, CharacterAI, and Mistral AI have also joined in. The advisory board includes prominent names such as Bob McGrew (former OpenAI Chief Research Officer) and Alec Radford (lead researcher behind several flagship AI models).
This powerhouse team has quickly put the six-month-old startup on the map, joining the list of fast-growing AI companies like Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Anthropic, started by ex-OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei — which recently reached $3 billion in annualized revenue.
Murati’s newly founded AI startup follows a governance structure where she holds a deciding vote on board matters, making her the major decision maker.
Thinking Machines Lab now stands at a powerful intersection of talent, vision, and capital, setting its sights on the next frontier of AI innovation. With Murati at the helm—following her high-profile exit from OpenAI—the company is poised to introduce a new wave of AI tools that focuses on collaborative human-AI interaction. The goal is to build AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than what’s available now, as mentioned in a blog post of Thinking Machines Lab. Murati launched the startup in February 2025, following her departure from OpenAI and with the present momentum, Thinking Machines Lab is being touted as a series contender in defining the next era of AI.