Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s A.I. Startup Hits $12B Valuation in Just 5 Months
Scant details are known about the inner workings of Thinking Machines Lab, an A.I. startup launched by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati. The company has yet to release an official product, but that hasn’t deterred major backers. Investors including Nvidia, AMD and Jane Street just contributed to a staggering $2 billion seed round, one of the largest in Silicon Valley history.
“Thinking Machines Lab exists to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence,” said Murati in an X post yesterday (July 15) announcing the round, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz and values the startup at $12 billion. “We’re building multimodal A.I. that works with how you naturally interact with the world—through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate,” she added.
Murati’s star power in the tech industry appears to be a key driver of investor confidence, even as the company keeps most of its progress under wraps. She spent six years at OpenAI, most recently as chief technology officer, and previously worked as a product manager at Tesla on the Model X. X. In 2023, Murati, 36, briefly stepped in as OpenAI’s interim CEO during Sam Altman’s temporary ouster. She left the company later that year to “create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
That exploration took shape in February with the launch of Thinking Machines Lab. The company draws talent from across the A.I. landscape, including former researchers from at Google, Meta and Mistral AI, along with a number of OpenAI alumni. Notable names on the team include John Schulman, Luke Metz, Lillian Weng and Barret Zoph, who now serves as the startup’s chief technology officer.
According to Murati, the startup is preparing to unveil its first product in the coming months. She said it will “include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models.” The startup is also actively hiring, with a focus on people passionate about translating research into “useful things.”
Murati is the latest in a growing list of former OpenAI executives who have launched high-profile ventures of their own. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist, left last year to found Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a secretive startup focused on safely developing advanced forms of A.I. SSI was valued at $32 billion earlier this year.
Another major player, Anthropic, was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI vice president of research Dario Amodei. The safety-focused firm raised $3.5 billion in May, pushing its valuation to $61.5 billion.
Beyond its product launch, Thinking Machines Lab also plans to share its research with the broader A.I. community. Murati said the goal is to help deepen understandings of frontier systems. “We believe A.I. should serve as an extension of individual agency and, in the spirit of freedom, be distributed as widely and equitably as possible,” she said.
