Thinking Machines Lab secures a record-breaking $2B seed funding round

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines Lab has closed a historic $2 billion seed round, marking the largest first funding round in Silicon Valley history. The deal, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Nvidia, Accel, Cisco, and AMD, values the less-than-year-old company at $12 billion.

The funding reflects intense investor appetite for promising AI labs amid the competitive race to build advanced AI systems. Thinking Machines has assembled an impressive team of OpenAI alumni, including cofounders John Schulman (ChatGPT co-creator), Barrett Zoph (former VP of research), Lilian Weng (AI safety), Andrew Tulloch (pretraining), and Luke Metz (post-training).

While the startup has remained secretive about its work, Murati recently hinted at the company's direction on X, describing plans for "multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world." She promised to unveil the first product within months, including a "significant open source offering" aimed at researchers and startups building custom AI models.

The massive valuation will undoubtedly help establish Thinking Machines as a potential threat to current leading organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, though the company faces an uphill battle to catch up with these well-funded incumbents.