Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab raised a $2B seed led by a16z at a $12B valuation; Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, and Jane Street also invested
bsky.app/profile/wire... [embedded post] @akhilrao : i feel like i've known Murati is at a startup called Thinking Machine Labs for months. maybe idk what “stealth” means [embedded post] Michael / @fleerultra : the butter— the butlerian jihad. you're hearing it more and more. and folks we're gonna do it. we're gonna all get rid of all the thinking machines. we're gonna make elon cry like a dog. he likes to pretend he's tough, but I told him 'you're fired' and then he was gone. butlerian jihad. X: Mira Murati / @miramurati : ...We're excited that in the next couple months we'll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. Soon, we'll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems. To accelerate our progress, we're happy to confirm that we've raised $2B led by a16z with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, Jane Street and more who share our mission. Alexander Kirillov / @_alex_kirillov_ : We have been working hard for the past 6 months on what I believe is the most ambitious multimodal AI program in the world. It is fantastic to see how pieces of a system that previously seemed intractable just fall into place. Feeling so lucky to create the future with this Sarah Wang / @sarahdingwang : Thrilled to back @miramurati and the world-class team behind ~ every major recent AI research and product breakthrough. RL (PPO, TRPO, GAE), reasoning, multimodal, Character, and of course ChatGPT! No one is better positioned to advance the frontier. Excited to see the future of @thinkymachines . AshutoshShrivastava / @ai_for_success : Mira Murati Thinking Machines Lab raised $2B to build collaborative general intelligence. - Building multimodal AI for natural human interaction - First product coming soon [image] Jeetu Patel / @jpatel41 : Delighted to be a strategic investor in Thinking Machines Lab. @miramurati we can't wait to work closely with you at @Cisco. Congratulations and looking forward to the possibilities ahead. Joe Mclaughlin / @joemclaugh20675 : This surprised me, a new start-up named Thinking Machines Lab just got like 2 billion funding and is valued at 10 billion it's not even a year old and has yet to reveal what is working on? It'll come up with something? Now that it is rich? But it's an AI company, throw it money! Rat King / @mikeisaac : Murati's secretive AI startup just raised another two billion..... Marco Mascorro / @mascobot : Super thrilled to back @miramurati and the amazing team @thinkymachines - a GOAT team that has made major contributions to RL, pre-training/post-training, reasoning, multimodal, and of course ChatGPT! No one is better positioned to advance the frontier. @martin_casado @pmarca Vikas SN / @tsuvik : 🚨Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines Labs confirms $2 billion fundraise led by a16z & participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, others 👉First product coming out in next couple of months. Will include a significant open source component Rowan Zellers / @rown : It's really fun to work with a talented yet small team. Our mission is ambitious - multimodal AI for collaborating with humans, so the best is yet to come! Join us— or fill out the application below if interested! Brij Singh / @brij : I like Thinking Machine's “CGI” mission I looked at their hiring page, more to guess on their architecture design. There's pre-training science, but no post-training science. Safety & alignment (likely research) is split from security (probably cybersec). And the classic divide remains: ML infra vs. Data infra... Cristina Criddle / @cristinacriddle : New - Nvidia, AMD and Jane Street (Anthropic investor) among participants in the $2bn funding round for Mira's startup Thinking Machines Lab - https://www.ft.com/... Sahil / @sahilypatel : a $2B seed round you can just do things Prashant / @prashant_1722 : BREAKING 🚨 Mira Murati announces $2B raise by Thinking Machines from Nvidia and AMD among others - open source AI component - multimodal - first reveal within couple of months [image] Nathan Lambert / @natolambert : “in the next couple months we'll be able to share our first product”, “include a significant open source component”, and “be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models” Stephen Roller / @stephenroller : We are moving incredibly fast. Come light up GPUs with us. Forums: Hacker News : Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
Context & Ripple Effects
Thinking Machines Lab’s financing ambition had already moved quickly: it was initially reported as seeking $1B at roughly a $9B valuation, before subsequent reporting described a $2B round at a lower reported valuation benchmark. This announcement establishes the company as a heavily financed new AI lab before its planned product release.
The investor roster combines venture capital with chip suppliers and enterprise-software companies. That fits the lab’s stated aim to serve researchers and startups building custom models, while giving its prospective platform unusual proximity to both infrastructure and enterprise channels.
First-order effects
- Thinking Machines Lab gains $2B in seed capital and a $12B valuation, giving Mira Murati’s team substantial runway to build and launch its planned product with an open-source component.
- Nvidia, AMD, Cisco and ServiceNow become financial stakeholders alongside a16z and Accel, linking the lab early to companies spanning AI hardware and enterprise distribution.
Second-order effects
- The round intensifies the contest for AI researchers, engineering talent and follow-on capital among new model-lab entrants; the earlier $1B fundraising target has now become a materially larger financing event.
- Strategic investors will have stronger incentives to explore how the lab’s eventual custom-model tooling could fit their infrastructure or enterprise products, though the announcement does not establish commercial commitments.
Third-order effects
- If similar rounds persist, frontier AI development will become still more concentrated among startups able to secure large, pre-product financings—an instance of earlier reporting on the same $2B raise and the broader convergence of venture funding with infrastructure suppliers.
- Open-source-oriented model tooling may increasingly be funded through mixed investor groups that include both independent VCs and incumbent technology vendors, potentially blurring the line between lab, platform and supplier.
The trend: This is one data point in the concentration of frontier-AI funding around well-connected labs that can pair large venture rounds with strategic infrastructure investors.