Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, is expanding her fundraising ambitions for Thinking Machines Lab, her hotly anticipated new generative AI company that has been the subject of feverish interest and speculation from investors in Silicon Valley.
The company is raising upward of $2 billion of venture funding, sources familiar with the matter told Business Insider. That is double what Murati was seeking less than two months ago when BI reported she was raising around $1 billion at a $9 billion valuation.
It is not clear the new valuation Murati is seeking, though two people said it is at least $10 billion.
The round is still in progress, and details could change. A spokesperson for Murati declined to comment.
The increased amount reflects intense investor enthusiasm for generative AI and the fact there are a very limited number of people with the expertise of Murati and the team she has assembled. It is also extremely expensive to train AI models and recruit and retain top talent.
OpenAI’s former chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and researcher, Alec Radford, both recently joined Thinking Machines.
Several of Murati’s other former coworkers are working for Thinking Machines, including John Schulman, who co-led the creation of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, formerly the head of special projects at OpenAI; Barret Zoph, a cocreator of ChatGPT; and Alexander Kirillov, who worked closely with Murati on ChatGPT’s voice mode.
Murati previously spent 6 ½ years at OpenAI, where she served as the chief technology officer, working on the development of ChatGPT and other AI research initiatives. She was briefly appointed interim CEO in November 2023 after OpenAI’s board abruptly fired Sam Altman, a move that sparked turmoil within the company. After Altman’s reinstatement as CEO, Murati resumed her role as CTO.
It has been a mystery what exactly Thinking Machines will do to distinguish itself in a crowded and well-funded field that includes not only OpenAI but also Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, and Google’s Gemini.
In a blog post earlier this year, Murati positioned the startup as an artificial intelligence research and product lab focused on making AI more accessible.
“To bridge the gaps, we’re building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” the post said.
Even by the standards of today’s frothy AI market, $2 billion of funding for a startup less than a year old with no product is a gargantuan sum and would almost certainly rank as one of the largest, if not the largest, seed rounds in history.
Last year, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever raised a $1 billion seed round for yet another AI startup, SSI.
