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OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati has raised $2bn for her new artificial intelligence start-up, in a deal which values the mysterious six-month-old company at $10bn.
The deal, which closed recently, according to multiple people familiar with the transaction, was one of the largest “seed” — or initial — funding rounds in Silicon Valley’s history.
San Francisco-based Thinking Machines Lab had not declared what it was working on, instead using Murati’s name and reputation to attract investors, said those familiar with the fundraise.
Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from Sarah Guo’s Conviction Partners, said those with knowledge of the deal.
The fundraising demonstrates the huge investor appetite in AI and faith in the vision of noteworthy founders to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Big Tech giants Google and Meta.
Murati, 36, left OpenAI in September, having helped drive the creation of products such as ChatGPT, image-generator Dall-E and its voice mode. She had also been a senior product manager at Tesla, where she worked on the Model X.
People with knowledge of the matter said she was one of the executives who had raised concerns about Sam Altman’s leadership before a failed board coup to oust OpenAI’s chief executive in November 2023. She was briefly named interim CEO before Altman was quickly reinstated.
Thinking Machines has also hired a number of former OpenAI employees, including co-founder John Schulman, former head of special projects Jonathan Lachman, and former vice-presidents Barret Zoph and Lilian Weng.
“There’s a real finite group of founders, and incredibly smart people,” one investor said. “The team [Murati has] pulled together is compelling.”
There was scant information on what the company is working on, however. In February, it said it aimed to make “AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable”, without providing further details.
Because of its highly clandestine nature, a number of funds that Murati pitched to passed on the deal, said multiple investors who were approached. One of these people added Murati’s pitch offered no information about a product or financial plans.
Another person said Thinking Machines was working on “artificial general intelligence”, a hypothetical point where computers have similar or superior levels of intelligence to humans. But they added that, at the moment, the group was still “strategising”.
Following the funding round, Murati would hold board voting rights that outweigh all other directors combined, ensuring she had final say over all critical decisions at the company, said people familiar with the deal. The voting structure was first reported by The Information.
A lack of product has also failed to deter investors from backing OpenAI’s former co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who raised $2bn in April for his start-up Safe Superintelligence at a $32bn valuation.
Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment.
