Former OpenAI executive’s startup Thinking Machines Lab raises nearly $2 billion in seed round

Former OpenAI executive’s startup Thinking Machines Lab raises nearly $2 billion in seed round

Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has raised nearly $2 billion in investment. Prior to the funding, it was valued at $10 billion, Bloomberg reports, citing sources.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz venture capital fund, with Accel, Conviction Partners, and other investors also participating. Mira Murati and the investors declined to comment.

For such a young company, the amount of funding is huge, even by Silicon Valley standards. Formally, it is a seed round, but in terms of volume, it exceeds anything that many startups receive during their entire existence.

Murati joined OpenAI in 2018, served as the company’s CTO, and after Sam Altman’s suspension, she became acting CEO. She left the company last year to start her own AI company.

She was followed by John Schulman (co-founder of OpenAI) and Barrett Zoff (former VP of research), who later joined Thinking Machines.

Not much is known about Murati’s new company at the moment. In a blog post published in February, the startup stated that it would focus on creating AI models and products that support a more humanized format of interaction between humans and artificial intelligence.

Safe Superintelligence, another startup by former OpenAI executive Ilya Sutskever, is also attracting large investments without a clear product. Last September, it raised $1 billion.