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Mira Murati’s secretive artificial intelligence start-up has named chip giants Nvidia and AMD among its new investors, as the former OpenAI chief technology officer closes one of the largest initial funding rounds in Silicon Valley history.
Thinking Machines Lab raised $2bn at a $12bn post-money valuation in a “seed” round, previously reported by the Financial Times, despite saying little about what it is working on.
Murati said the company would share a product in the next “couple [of] months”, which would have an “open source component” helping researchers and start-ups to develop custom models.
The San Francisco-based company on Tuesday announced the Andreessen Horowitz-led round, with participation from Nvidia, AMD, venture capital firm Accel and Jane Street.
The two chips companies play a key role in the AI market by supplying the computing hardware needed to train and run powerful models.
Jane Street has backed several start-ups since 2020, many in AI and decentralised finance. The trading firm is an investor in Anthropic, after buying shares from bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2024.
As an executive of OpenAI, Murati, 36, worked on the development of products such as ChatGPT, the Dall-E image generator and its voice mode. She briefly replaced Sam Altman as interim chief executive officer during a board coup in November 2023.
“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,” said Murati.
She also posted a link to apply for a job amid a fierce hiring battle for AI talent in the Valley. Thinking Machines has already hired a number of former OpenAI employees, as well as those from other competitors such as Google, Meta and Mistral.
Murati left OpenAI in September, saying she wanted to “create the time and space to do [her] own exploration”. Previously, Murati was a senior product manager at Tesla, where she contributed to the Model X.