Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has raised $2 billion in a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The seed round also attracted other high-profile backers, including Nvidia, AMD, Accel, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Jane Street. This investment reportedly values the company at $12 billion, even though it has not yet launched a product or generated any revenue. It clearly makes the startup one of the most valuable early-stage AI companies in history.
Although the company is still operating largely in stealth mode, Murati has outlined a clear vision for its mission and technology in her latest post on X. According to her, the company aims to develop advanced multimodal AI systems, meaning models that can understand and generate not just text, but also images, audio, and other forms of input.
The goal is to create AI tools that are not only intelligent but also collaborative, designed to work alongside humans and enhance their capabilities rather than replace them. Murati describes this vision as collaborative general intelligence, and it sets Thinking Machines Lab apart from other startups that are primarily focused on building standalone AI agents.
Murati has confirmed that the company’s first AI product is in development and will be released in the coming months. She also revealed that the launch will include a significant open-source component, allowing developers, startups, and researchers to build on top of the company’s models.
Notably, the Murati-led company is registered as a Public-Benefit Corporation (PBC), a legal structure that allows it to pursue broader social goals alongside financial returns. This becomes interesting as the AI trendsetter OpenAI is also restructuring its for-profit operations into a Delaware-based public-benefit corporation, while remaining under the oversight of its nonprofit parent.
Another notable feature of the company is its unique governance structure, which grants Murati an unusually high level of control. Reports indicate that she holds special voting rights equivalent to the combined influence of all other board members, plus one. It effectively gives her the final say in board-level decisions. Such a founder-first structure is highly rare, especially at this scale of funding. At present, the startup reportedly employs around 30 people, many of whom are former researchers and engineers from leading AI organizations like OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral (like John Schulman, a key figure behind ChatGPT).
The development comes at a time when the AI race is heating up, especially with the rise of low-cost alternatives like DeepSeek. Meanwhile, some earlier reports suggest that OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is also raising another $1 billion at a valuation of over $30 billion.
