Thinking Machines Lab Officially Closes $2B at $12B Valuation, Teases First Product Launch

In a stunning development that underscores Silicon Valley’s insatiable appetite for AI talent, 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.

From $10B to $12B in Just Weeks

Several outlets reported in June that Thinking Machines Lab was close to closing this $2 billion funding round at a $10 billion valuation, but, apparently, that valuation has shot up in the last month. The rapid increase suggests intense competition among investors to get a piece of what many see as the next potential AI powerhouse.

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. To put this in perspective, The $2 billion Andreessen Horowitz-led financing that Thinking Machines reportedly just closed at a $10 billion valuation is by far the largest seed round in the Crunchbase dataset. It’s not even close.

Breaking Six Months of Silence

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:

“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

The mention of “multimodal AI” and “collaborative general intelligence” suggests Thinking Machines Lab is working on systems that can process and integrate multiple types of input—text, vision, audio—similar to what OpenAI has done with GPT-4V but potentially more advanced.

The Team: OpenAI’s Brain Drain Continues

Since Murati launched her venture, Thinking Machines Lab has attracted some of her former co-workers at OpenAI, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and Luke Metz. By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI.

Key hires include:

John Schulman: OpenAI co-founder who joined after a brief stint at AnthropicBob McGrew: Previously OpenAI’s chief research officer (advisor)Alec Radford: Lead researcher for OpenAI (advisor)Jonathan Lachman and Barret Zoph: Former OpenAI employees

Murati says her company is currently trying to staff up, specifically for people with a track record of “building successful AI-driven products from the ground up,” according to the startup’s website.

Unprecedented Control Structure

One wrinkle that’s already raising eyebrows: the company’s governance structure. Thinking Machines Lab follows grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders.

This structure gives Murati unusual control — she holds board voting rights that outweigh all other directors combined. That’s remarkable for a six-month-old company with no disclosed products. But it’s not unprecedented in today’s AI landscape.

The $2 Billion Question: What Are They Building?

According to people briefed on the matter, Thinking Machines is working on artificial general intelligence — the hypothetical point where AI systems match or exceed human cognitive abilities across all domains. The startup’s focus is on building AI systems that are more “widely understood, customizable, and generally capable,” according to its blog.

With billions in funding, Murati may have enough of a war chest to train frontier AI models. Thinking Machines Lab previously struck a deal with Google Cloud to power its AI models.

Market Context: The New AI Arms Race

The funding structure and valuation place Thinking Machines Lab in exclusive company:

OpenAI: Raised $6.6 billion in October at a $157 billion valuationxAI: Pulled in two separate $6 billion rounds this yearSafe Superintelligence: Raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation (also without a product)

But those companies at least have products in market and revenue to show for their efforts—except SSI, which like Thinking Machines, is betting purely on founder reputation.

Next Steps and Challenges

Surely, Thinking Machines Lab has an uphill battle to catch up with other AI labs. It’s likely banking on novel research breakthroughs to set it apart; however, that’s an increasingly difficult task as Meta, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI invest billions in their own research teams.

Building AGI requires massive computational resources, specialized talent, and years of research with uncertain outcomes. Even with $2 billion in the bank, the company will need to show progress relatively quickly to justify its valuation and attract follow-on funding.

The Bottom Line

A $10 billion valuation for a company with no public product or revenue has sparked questions about whether the current AI boom is sustainable—or just another bubble in disguise. But for many VCs, the math isn’t about revenue; it’s about risk and reward. If Murati’s startup becomes a category-defining company, the early bets will pay off many times over.

For now, though, Murati has bought herself something invaluable in the fast-moving AI world: time and resources to build without the pressure of immediately justifying every technical decision to the public or competitors. With Tuesday’s cryptic announcement about multimodal AI and collaborative intelligence, it seems the veil of secrecy may finally be lifting—though how much Thinking Machines Lab will reveal remains to be seen.

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