She helped build ChatGPT—Now she's raised $2B to rival it
What's the story
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's new venture, called Thinking Machines Lab, has raised a record-breaking $2 billion in seed funding at a $12 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, Accel, and Jane Street Capital. This is one of the largest early-stage investments in AI history, highlighting the fierce competition for top AI talent and innovation.
Future plans
Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025
Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025 in San Francisco and structured as a public-benefit corporation. Murati now serves as CEO alongside co‑founders like John Schulman, Barrett Zoph, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz—each bringing technical expertize from OpenAI In a post on X, Murati shared the vision behind Thinking Machines Lab. She said, "We believe AI should serve as an extension of individual agency and, in the spirit of freedom, be distributed as widely and equitably as possible."
Product launch
Thinking Machines Lab will launch its first product soon
Murati revealed that Thinking Machines Lab will unveil its first product "in the next couple of months." The start-up is working on multimodal AI systems that would match human interaction with the world through conversation and sight. The offering will have an open-source component for researchers and other start-ups. She added, "Soon, we'll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems."