Mira Murati, who left her role as chief technology officer at OpenAI last September, has doubled the funding target for her artificial intelligence startup, Thinking Machines Lab, to $2 billion according to people familiar with the matter.
The unprecedented seed round, if completed, would value the company at “at least” $10 billion, despite having no product or revenue to speak of. The startup emerged from stealth only two months ago.
What Thinking Machines Lab does have is an impressive roster of talent. The company has assembled approximately 30 researchers and engineers from leading AI organizations including OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral. Most notably, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman serves as chief scientist, while Barret Zoph, who previously led model post-training at OpenAI, has taken the role of chief technology officer.
“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 startup explained in a blog post when it emerged from stealth in February.
Just last week, the company’s advisory team expanded to include Bob McGrew, formerly OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a pioneer in generative pre-trained transformers who previously led groundbreaking research at OpenAI.
The massive funding target comes amid a backdrop of extraordinary investment in artificial intelligence. Last month, OpenAI secured a historic $40 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to $300 billion. Meanwhile, another OpenAI co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, raised $1 billion in seed funding for his own venture called Safe Superintelligence.
Murati, who led the development of ChatGPT and DALL-E during her six-year tenure at OpenAI, briefly served as the company’s interim CEO during the leadership crisis that saw Sam Altman temporarily ousted in November 2023. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once praised her “ability to build teams with technical expertise, commercial insight, and a strong understanding of mission importance” in Time’s 2023 list of emerging leaders.
Though details about Thinking Machines Lab remain sparse, the company has stated its mission is to “make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” with an emphasis on research, multimodality, and safety.
The fundraising effort represents what some analysts are calling a paradigm shift in startup financing, particularly in the face of economic uncertainty. Trump’s tariffs, though temporarily paused, could create pressure on the AI boom, and broader economic indicators suggest a potential recession ahead.