Thinking Machines Lab
Foundation Models
- Valuation
- $12B(2025)
- Total Funding
- $2B
- Profit Status
- Pre-profit
- Employees
- ~50
About Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. The company focuses on making AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and capable, with an emphasis on multimodal models and human-AI collaboration. It assembled a high-profile team of ex-OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral researchers and reached a $12B valuation in one of the largest seed rounds in history.
Company History
Founded Feb 2025 by Mira Murati (former OpenAI CTO) alongside a team of prominent ex-OpenAI researchers including John Schulman (co-creator of ChatGPT/PPO), Barret Zoph, and Alec Radford (lead author of the original GPT). Raised a record $2B seed round at a $12B valuation (2025) led by Andreessen Horowitz. Launched Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-weight models, as its first product (Oct 2025). Focuses on customizable, multimodal, and human-collaborative AI systems.
Funding Rounds
1 rounds| Date | Round | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Seed | $2B | a16z, NVIDIA, AMD, Accel, $12B valuation |
Products & Services
2- Tinker (fine-tuning API)
- (Frontier multimodal research)
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Mira Murati (CEO)
- John Schulman (Chief Scientist)
- Barret Zoph (CTO)
- Alec Radford
Key Investors
- Andreessen Horowitz
- NVIDIA
- AMD
- Accel
- Cisco
- ServiceNow
Competitive Landscape
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Safe Superintelligence
- Mistral AI