It hasn’t even launched its first product, but already Mira Murati’s Thinking Machine Labs has attracted some $2bn in investment and is being valued at $12bn.
It is a sure sign of just how much US investors are committed to the AI project that Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has been able to attract big name investors on such a scale before even bringing a product to market. In a round led by A16z (Andreessen Horowitz), the start-up has raised some $2bn.
As CTO at OpenAI Murati oversaw some of the major developments at the AI giant, including the likes of ChatGPT, and even briefly took over as interim chief executive officer of OpenAI when Sam Altman was removed in November 2023, and subsequently reinstated.
“We’re excited that in the next couple months we’ll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open-source component and be useful for researchers and start-ups developing custom models,” said Murati in a post on X last night (15 July).
“Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.”
Murati confirmed that the round was led by A16z (Andreessen Horowitz) and had participation from chips giants Nvidia and AMD, as well as Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco and Jane Street.
It will be interesting to see how significant the open-source component will be, given that OpenAI just last weekend confirmed it had postponed its open source model for safety reasons, and the big Chinese players such as Moonshot AI and DeepSeek are all betting on open source.
“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,” Murati said.
“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world – through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.”
Murati abruptly left the ChatGPT maker back in September 2024, and said she planned to pursue her own project. For a start-up that only launched in February and has yet to release its first product, it seems to confirm that Silicon Valley’s love story with AI and leading AI talent is far from over.
It all comes at a time when Meta’s Zuckerberg has been actively poaching OpenAI talent, and one can probably assume that several of the Thinking Machine Labs team would have been approached.
Murati is just the latest of former OpenAI executives to strike out on her own – think Anthropic’s Dario and Daniela Amodei and Safe SuperIntelligence’s Ilya Sutskever. Thinking Machine Labs is definitely one to watch.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.