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.
Several outlets reported in June that Thinking Machines Lab was close to closing this $2B funding round at a $10 billion valuation, but, apparently, that valuation has shot up in the last month.
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. 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 in the “next couple months,” and it will include a “significant open source offering.” Murati also said the product will be useful for researchers and startups building custom AI models.
“Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems,” said Murati.
It’s unclear if Murati means that Thinking Machines Lab will release an open AI model, as some of OpenAI’s other competitors have done to undercut the ChatGPT-maker’s offerings. A Thinking Machines Lab spokesperson declined to comment further.
Since Murati launched her venture, Thinking Machines Lab has attracted some of her former coworkers at OpenAI, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and Luke Metz. 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.
Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines Lab in recent months to bolster its superintelligence efforts, but they didn’t progress to a final offer.
Thinking Machines Lab is one of a handful of AI startups that investors believe to be a legitimate threat to leading AI model developers today, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
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.
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.
