Thinking Machines Lab launches
The founding team of roughly 30 researchers, drawn heavily from OpenAI, had no public product and disclosed no funding figure at launch.
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Mira Murati, who had left OpenAI as chief technology officer the previous September, announced Thinking Machines Lab, a new AI research and product company. She said in the announcement that she had started it “alongside a remarkable team of scientists, engineers, and builders,” describing three areas of focus: adapting AI systems to specific human needs, building stronger technical foundations for more capable systems, and fostering a culture of open science.
The founding team was drawn heavily from her former employer, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as chief research officer and former OpenAI research executive Barret Zoph as chief technology officer, alongside Lilian Weng and other researchers who had also left OpenAI, Meta and Mistral. Reporting at launch put headcount at around 30. The company disclosed no product, no revenue and no funding figures at the time — it would raise its first outside capital, a $2 billion seed round, five months later.
The launch was notable less for anything the company had built than for what it signalled about the frontier-lab talent market: a founding team senior enough, and connected enough, to be funded and staffed at scale before shipping anything. Thinking Machines went on to publish research posts, then released Tinker, a fine-tuning API, in October 2025, and its first open-weight model the following year.