In the most significant AI fundraising development to date, Thinking Machines Lab has raised a staggering $2B seed round-by far the largest ever recorded. The San Francisco-based company, launched in 2024 and founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is already valued at $10B following the Andreessen Horowitz-led deal.
Thinking Machines Lab’s $2B raise doesn’t just eclipse previous records-it dwarfs them. The next closest seed rounds, such as Yuga Labs’ $450M in 2022 and Lila Sciences’ $200M earlier this year, barely register in comparison. Yet despite the size of the round, industry watchers are far from surprised. With a founding team composed of senior talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta and Mistral AI, expectations were sky-high from day one.
A team born from the frontier of general AI research
Mira Murati is no stranger to building globally impactful AI. As the former CTO of OpenAI, she led development efforts on GPT-4 and other multimodal systems that laid the groundwork for the current generation of large language models. Her departure and move to establish Thinking Machines Lab was closely followed by top-tier engineers and researchers from across the AI landscape.
Their goal is bold: to build general-purpose, collaborative AI systems that are both powerful and widely customisable. The company’s early messaging speaks of creating “multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively,” suggesting ambitions beyond existing chatbots and into real-time, cross-domain interaction spanning text, voice, image, and beyond.
According to company statements, Thinking Machines aims “to make AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable.” This points toward a broader vision-building tools not just for developers or enterprises, but for everyday users to shape AI to their own needs, safely and intuitively.
Setting a new pace for AI investment
While $2B might sound surreal for a startup with no released product, context is everything. OpenAI’s most recent valuation hit $300B, while competitors like Anthropic, xAI, and Mistral are all raising at multibillion-dollar valuations with only months-or even weeks-of traction. In this world of capital-intensive AI development, Thinking Machines’ raise is both a record and a sign of the times.
Andreessen Horowitz, a longtime backer of AI and frontier tech, led the round, continuing a streak of high-stakes bets that includes Anthropic, Character.ai, and Aptos Labs. Other investors were not publicly disclosed at the time of the announcement.
What makes Thinking Machines Lab different
Although the details of Thinking Machines Lab’s technical roadmap are still under wraps, its positioning is clear. Rather than building just another chatbot or model API, the company plans to pursue collaborative AI-systems that operate more like intelligent teammates than tools.
The mention of “customisable” AI suggests a user-centric approach, perhaps akin to fine-tuning but with lower friction, allowing individuals and teams to train, adapt, and safely control how the AI behaves in real-world contexts.
In a crowded field where model quality is converging, these differentiators-ease of use, flexibility, and multi-modal collaboration-could define the next wave of AI winners. Whether Thinking Machines Lab succeeds will depend on how well it translates its star-powered team and flush capital into technology that’s both advanced and accessible.
The future for Thinking Machines Lab
With $2B in the bank and talent from every corner of the AI research world, Thinking Machines Lab has the resources to act like a late-stage unicorn from day one. Hiring is expected to ramp up globally, with a focus on engineering, product design, infrastructure and partnerships.
The company has not yet released a public product or roadmap, though anticipation is already building in both technical and enterprise circles. If successful, Thinking Machines Lab could help set a new bar for AI systems that aren’t just powerful, but also transparent, adaptive, and cooperative.
In the emerging era of general-purpose AI, Thinking Machines Lab may become the most closely watched startup on the planet-not just because of its record-setting seed round, but because of what it might build next.
