Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's AI Startup Raises $2B Seed Funding Round

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's artificial intelligence startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has raised $2 billion in a funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Murati said in a social media post on X.

The seed round also saw participation from Nvidia (NVDA), Accel, ServiceNow (NOW), Cisco (CSCO), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Jane Street Capital, among others. Reuters reported the latest funding round values the startup at $12 billion.

According to a TechCrunch report, the size of the seed funding round is one of the largest in Silicon Valley history.

Thinking Machines Lab, which Murati announced in February, after her abrupt exit from OpenAI (OPENAI), is developing multimodal AI that "works with how you naturally interact with the world - through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate."

Murati said the company will unveil its first products and select open-source components in the coming months, followed by the release of research tied to its AI systems.

Thinking Machines Lab, founded with two-thirds of its launch team made up of former OpenAI staff, is the latest AI startup to emerge from the ranks of OpenAI leadership, as rapid advances in AI continue to accelerate.   

In 2020, former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei founded Anthropic, which has since raised billions from Amazon (AMZN). OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever launched Safe Superintelligence last year, following a fallout with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The development comes amid an intensifying battle for AI talent. Meta has recently lured engineers and researchers from rivals with outsized compensation packages. The social media giant also reportedly explored acquiring Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence, along with their teams, but those talks ultimately fell through.

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