The artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab, founded by Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, announced a $2 billion seed round of funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from well-known institutions such as NVIDIA, AMD, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, and Jane Street. This financing has valued the company at $12 billion, making it one of the largest early-stage investments in the AI field, highlighting Murati's strong influence in the AI industry.
According to reports, Thinking Machines Lab was established in February 2025, based in San Francisco, and is positioned as a public benefit company, dedicated to developing multimodal AI that interacts with humans in a natural way, including scenarios such as conversation, vision, and collaboration. Murati stated that the company aims to build "general intelligence that collaborates with humans," making AI more understandable, customizable, and widely applicable across various fields. The first product is expected to be released in the coming months, including open-source components to support academic research and developer customization of models.
The company's team includes top talents from OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral, including John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI. Murati emphasized that Thinking Machines Lab will promote AI alignment research by sharing code and datasets, helping to build transparent AI systems that align with human values.
