Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati, officially closed a $2 billion seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz on Monday, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The deal, which includes participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, and Jane Street, values the startup at $12 billion, the spokesperson said.
Several outlets reported in June that Thinking Machines Lab was close to closing this $2B funding round at a $10 billion valuation, but, apparently, that valuation has shot up in the last month.
The deal marks one of the largest seed rounds — or first funding rounds — in Silicon Valley history, representing the massive investor appetite to back promising new AI labs. Thinking Machines Lab is less than a year old and has yet to reveal what it’s working on.
However, Murati peeled back the curtain on the company’s first product a bit in a post on X Tuesday, claiming that the startup plans to unveil its work in the “next couple months,” and it will include a “significant open source offering.” Murati also said the product will be useful for researchers and startups building custom AI models.
“Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems,” said Murati.
Thinking Machines Lab exists to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence.
We're building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world – through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate. We're… — Mira Murati (@miramurati) July 15, 2025
It’s unclear if Murati means that Thinking Machines Lab will release an open AI model, as some of OpenAI’s other competitors have done to undercut the ChatGPT-maker’s offerings. A Thinking Machines Lab spokesperson declined to comment further.
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