Six months after leaving OpenAI, Mira Murati has pulled off one of the most audacious fundraising stunts in Silicon Valley history. Her secretive AI startup Thinking Machines Lab just closed a $2 billion seed round at a $10 billion valuation — without revealing what the company actually builds.
Key Points
- Six-month-old Thinking Machines is now worth $10 billion.
- A16z is headlining the $2 billion round; minimum ticket size is $50 million.
- Murati has lured ex-OpenAI heavyweights like John Schulman and Bob McGrew.
The deal shows just how much investor appetite exists for proven AI talent, even when that talent won't say what they're working on. According to people familiar with the transaction, some funds passed on the opportunity precisely because Murati's pitch offered no information about products or financial plans. But Andreessen Horowitz and others were willing to bet big on her track record — and what a track record it is.
During her six years at OpenAI, Murati led development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the code-writing system Codex. When the board briefly ousted Sam Altman last November, she stepped in as interim CEO. Her departure in September came amid a broader exodus that's now regrouped under her leadership, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, who bounced from OpenAI to Anthropic and now to Thinking Machines in less than a year.
The funding structure gives Murati unusual control — she holds board voting rights that outweigh all other directors combined. That's remarkable for a six-month-old company with no disclosed products. But it's not unprecedented in today's AI landscape. Safe Superintelligence, co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation without shipping anything either.
The $2 billion figure puts Thinking Machines in rarified company. For context, OpenAI itself raised $6.6 billion in October at a $157 billion valuation, while Elon Musk's xAI has pulled in two separate $6 billion rounds this year. But those companies at least have products in market and revenue to show for their efforts.
According to people briefed on the matter, Thinking Machines is working on artificial general intelligence — the hypothetical point where AI systems match or exceed human cognitive abilities across all domains. It's the same goal pursued by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google's DeepMind, and virtually every other major AI lab.
The secrecy strategy might actually be strategic. In an industry where technical details can provide competitive advantages to rivals, keeping quiet until you have something substantial to show makes sense. Both OpenAI and Anthropic were similarly secretive in their early days, revealing their capabilities only when ready to deploy them.
But the approach also carries risks. Building AGI requires massive computational resources, specialized talent, and years of research with uncertain outcomes. Even with $2 billion in the bank, the company will need to show progress relatively quickly to justify its valuation and attract follow-on funding.
For investors, this represents a classic Silicon Valley bet: that the people who built today's leading AI systems can do it again, potentially better. With AI's market potential measured in trillions and talent being the scarcest resource, that may be a calculated risk worth taking.
For now, though, Murati has bought herself something invaluable in the fast-moving AI world: time and resources to build without the pressure of immediately justifying every technical decision to the public or competitors.