Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab raises $2bn seed at $12bn valuation

Thinking Machines Lab, founded five months earlier by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation, reported as the largest first funding round in Silicon Valley history. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, Accel, ServiceNow and Jane Street.

The company had shipped no public product at the time of the round. Murati had assembled a team drawn heavily from former OpenAI colleagues, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph and Lilian Weng, betting that the market would fund research capacity ahead of revenue in a way it had for OpenAI and Anthropic before it. Murati said the company expected to share its first product within a couple of months, describing it as including “a significant open source component” aimed at researchers and start-ups building custom models — a description that pointed toward the Tinker fine-tuning platform the lab launched that October.

The valuation was notable less for the dollar figure than for what it revealed about investor appetite at the top of the market: a company with no shipped product, built primarily on the strength of its founder’s reputation and her ability to recruit senior researchers away from incumbent labs, could raise capital at a scale that dwarfed the seed rounds of the previous AI cycle. It reinforced a pattern already visible across the industry that year, in which the scarce resource was not capital but the small pool of researchers capable of building frontier systems, and in which raising money and hiring them away from rivals had become close to the same act.