Just a few months after its founding, the AI startup of former OpenAI CTO Murati is worth 12 billion

Mira Murati is said to have secured $2 billion for her new AI startup – with a focus on AGI and a team of OpenAI veterans.

In September 2024, Mira Murati announced her departure from OpenAI. In her message to staff, she stated that she wanted to pursue her own research.

She was part of OpenAI for over six years, and for the past two and a half years she led the technical product development for ChatGPT and the image generator Dall-E as CTO.

Following Altman's brief dismissal in 2023 , Murati temporarily assumed the CEO position. She has been dubbed OpenAI's "Minister of Truth" for her efforts to ensure the company's AI products are not misleading or biased.

Shortly after her resignation, she founded her own AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. In June , the Financial Times (FT) reported that she had raised approximately €1.7 billion ($2 billion) in a seed round, at a valuation of €8.7 billion ($10 billion).

Now Murati herself has confirmed the financing on X. The $2 billion round was led by a16z. Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street also participated, according to her post.

This is one of the largest seed funding rounds in Silicon Valley history, insiders told the FT.

In recent weeks, the company's valuation is said to have risen significantly again—to over ten billion euros (twelve billion dollars). A spokesperson for Thinking Machines Lab confirmed this to TechCrunch .

At the time of seed funding, the startup had only been in existence for six months and there was little public information about the product or future plans.

Murati has since given initial hints on X about Thinking Machines Lab's upcoming product. It is expected to be unveiled in the coming months and will contain a significant open source component. The goal is to provide researchers and startups with a useful foundation for developing their own AI models.

Murati also announced that the company will soon publish its scientific findings to help the research community better understand modern AI systems.

Thinking Machines Lab Website

According to FT, the seed investors are primarily relying on Murati's reputation—she was instrumental in the development of ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Voice Mode . Other investors are said to have declined to invest because of a lack of information about the product or business model, according to FT.

Murati was able to bring high-profile former OpenAI employees on board. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, former Head of Special Projects Jonathan Lachman, and former VPs Barret Zoph and Lilian Wenig joined Thinking Machines Lab.

According to FT insiders, Thinking Machines Lab is working on "Artificial General Intelligence" – systems comparable to or superior to human intelligence. In February, the company vaguely stated that it wanted to make AI "more understandable, adaptable, and generally more capable," the article states.

The startup is said to have an unusual governance structure. According to FT, the financing structure gives Murati more voting rights than all other board members combined, giving her the final say on all important decisions.

Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment to FT, it is said.