Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence startup founded by Mira Murati, former chief technology officer of OpenAI, has closed a $2 billion seed funding round.
Thinking Machines is a new AI lab formed by former OpenAI, Meta, and DeepMind researchers—including Mira Murati and John Schulman—focused on building customizable, multimodal foundation models for real-world applications in science, programming, and beyond. With a founding team that helped create ChatGPT, PyTorch, Fairseq, and GPT-4o-mini, the company is positioned to compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic. Their emphasis on open research, infrastructure quality, and human-AI collaboration signals a move toward accessible, high-performance systems.
Notably, their website, tone, and branding closely mirror the style of Safe Superintelligence, the company founded by Ilya Sutskever—with whom Murati previously worked at OpenAI.
The round values the six-month-old firm at $10 billion, potentially representing the largest seed round in history. The global artificial intelligence market is projected to reach a substantial value in the coming years, though precise figures vary across projections.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Participating investors included Conviction Partners.
"This is a significant milestone for Thinking Machines Lab," commented Mira Murati, Founder and CEO at Thinking Machines Lab.
Several former OpenAI employees have joined Murati at Thinking Machines Lab, including co-founder John Schulman. Murati departed OpenAI in September 2024 after overseeing the development of key AI products such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and voice mode. Her departure followed internal disagreements regarding the leadership of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
