Mira Murati, who previously led the development of ChatGPT and DALL-E at OpenAI, has secured a historic $2 billion investment for her AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, valuing the company at $10 billion.
The funding round, led by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Accel and Conviction Partners, shatters previous seed funding records. For context, the next largest seed rounds in history were Yuga Labs' $450 million in 2022 and Lila Sciences' $200 million earlier this year.
Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025, just months after leaving her position as Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI in September 2024. The startup has assembled an impressive team of AI talent, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as chief scientist and former OpenAI VP of Research Barret Zoph as CTO. The company has attracted approximately 30 researchers and engineers from leading AI organizations including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Mistral AI.
Rather than focusing solely on developing autonomous AI systems, Thinking Machines Lab aims to create collaborative AI that works alongside humans. The company's mission is to make AI systems "more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable" than current offerings. According to their blog post, they're addressing key gaps in the AI landscape, particularly the concentration of knowledge about frontier AI systems within a few top research labs.
"While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications," the company stated. They've also committed to contributing to AI alignment research by sharing code, datasets, and model specifications.
Murati joins a growing list of former OpenAI executives launching well-funded AI ventures, including Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and Dario Amodei's Anthropic. Her startup's rapid ascent to a $10 billion valuation reflects the continued investor confidence in AI technology and highlights the competitive landscape as former executives from established AI companies launch their own ventures.