Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab raises $2 billion seed round at $10 billion valuation

Thinking Machines Lab, the artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has raised $2 billion in a seed funding round, valuing the six-month-old venture at $10 billion, according to a report by the Financial Times.

The deal, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Conviction Partners (founded by ex-Greylock investor Sarah Guo), is among the largest-ever seed rounds in Silicon Valley’s history — underlining the investor frenzy surrounding AI model companies founded by ex-OpenAI leaders.

Thinking Machines Lab has hired a number of former OpenAI researchers, along with talent from Meta and French startup Mistral, to build a next-generation AI platform aimed at enabling more collaborative human-AI interaction.

Founded in February 2025, the company is led by Murati as CEO and now counts a team of about 30 engineers and researchers, nearly two-thirds of whom are ex-OpenAI employees.

Notably, John Schulman, cofounder of OpenAI and former head of alignment, has joined Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist, marking his second move in under a year after briefly joining Anthropic in August 2024. Another key hire is Barret Zoph, a researcher who exited OpenAI on the same day as Murati in September 2024.

The venture joins a growing list of AI model companies founded by former OpenAI executives. These include:

• Anthropic, co-founded by ex-OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, which recently hit $3 billion in annualised revenue
• Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI), co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, which is reportedly in talks to raise funds at a $20 billion valuation

The departure of top talent from OpenAI, many of whom were involved in building early versions of GPT, has led to the formation of multiple rival labs, attracting billions of dollars from investors eager to bet on the next wave of general-purpose AI models.