San Francisco, July 2025 — Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, has launched her next venture with a bang: her startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has closed a $2 billion seed funding round, valuing the company at $12 billion one of the largest seed-stage raises in tech history .
Founded in February 2025 and emerging from stealth this July, Thinking Machines is building advanced multimodal AI systems that can understand and interact with the world using speech, vision, and natural collaboration. Murati, who briefly led OpenAI as interim CEO in 2023 and earlier helped bring ChatGPT, DALL·E, and voice mode to life, now heads a team of world-class researchers from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Mistral.
The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with heavyweight backing from Nvidia, AMD, Accel, Cisco, and Jane Street. Murati has announced that a product with an open-source component aimed at researchers and startups will be released in the coming months.
🚀 What This Round Reveals
- Record-breaking seed round: A massive $2B investment in a company with no public product or revenue marks a new high in AI startup bets.
- Global investor confidence: Strategic investments from hardware leaders (Nvidia, AMD) and software giants (Cisco, Accel) confirm deep conviction in Murati’s vision.
- Talent attraction: Thinking Machines has already recruited top AI minds, including OpenAI alums who worked on ChatGPT and GPT‑4.
Why It Matters to India
Indian AI founders can learn from Murati’s approach building deep research-first startups, backed by global capital and product roadmaps that include open-source contributions. This mirrors growing ambition in India’s AI ecosystem.
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