Why investors are throwing $2 billion at Mira Murati
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is reportedly aiming to raise a staggering $2 billion in its seed funding round — doubling its initial target from just weeks ago.
According to Business Insider, this latest fundraising push would value the company at a minimum of $10 billion, marking one of the largest seed rounds in tech history. The report comes just a month after Murati’s startup was seeking $1 billion at a $9 billion valuation, showing how quickly investor appetite for top-tier AI talent has escalated.
A startup with no product but all the talentThinking Machines Lab is still in its earliest stages, with no product, no revenue, and very little public detail about its technology. What it does have, however, is a growing roster of some of the most influential minds in artificial intelligence — and that’s proving more than enough to draw billions from investors.
Since emerging from stealth, the company has hired or attracted advisors like:
- Bob McGrew: OpenAI’s former chief research officer
- Alec Radford: Co-creator of key OpenAI models
- John Schulman: Co-led the ChatGPT project at OpenAI
- Jonathan Lachman: Former head of special projects at OpenAI
- Barret Zoph: Co-creator of ChatGPT
- Alexander Kirillov: Former ChatGPT voice mode collaborator
In addition to OpenAI veterans, Murati has also recruited talent from Meta, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Character AI, turning Thinking Machines Lab into something of a who’s-who of AI’s elite developers.
What does Thinking Machines Lab want to build?Publicly, Murati has described her mission in broad terms: to build AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” than current offerings. In a blog post earlier this year, she positioned the company’s goal as improving accessibility in AI — making powerful tools more flexible and transparent to end users.
But the company’s exact product plans remain unclear. Sources suggest that the early focus is less about launching a product quickly and more about building a world-class research lab capable of challenging incumbents like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
The OpenAI diaspora keeps getting richerMurati is the latest in a growing list of former OpenAI executives launching billion-dollar ventures. The trend is reshaping the landscape of advanced AI research:
- Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder, launched Safe Superintelligence Inc. in 2024 and raised $1 billion.
- Dario and Daniela Amodei, both ex-OpenAI, founded Anthropic, which has secured over $8 billion in funding from backers like Amazon.
- Murati’s own fundraising journey started modestly — early reports last year indicated she was seeking around $100 million before quickly escalating her target to $1 billion, and now $2 billion.
Despite having no product or defined commercial direction, Thinking Machines Lab sits at the heart of an extraordinary moment in AI investing. For top-tier founders with OpenAI credentials, funding seems almost limitless.
Murati’s rise also comes after her dramatic exit from OpenAI, following the chaotic leadership crisis that briefly saw her appointed interim CEO when Sam Altman was fired in November 2023. Altman later returned to the CEO role, and Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 to chart her own path.
Now, less than a year later, she’s leading one of the most ambitious AI ventures in Silicon Valley — backed not by products, but by people.
What’s next for Thinking Machines Lab?If the $2 billion seed round closes as expected, Thinking Machines Lab would instantly become one of the best-capitalized AI startups in the world — before shipping a single product.
Whether Murati can translate this war chest and talent pool into breakthrough AI systems remains to be seen. But the pattern is clear: in the world of generative AI, it’s not just about what you’ve built — it’s about who you’ve built it with.