OpenAI's former CTO Mira Murati's startup is raising new financing.
$2 billion (equivalent to 14.6 billion yuan), and it's still a seed round!
Sources say that once financing is completed, Thinking Machines Lab's valuation will reach over $10 billion.
Yes, this is an AI startup less than a year old (officially announced just two months ago), with no products yet, now valued at $10 billion.
It can almost be confirmed that $2 billion is one of the largest seed round financings in history.
The ability to raise so much money is related to Mira Murati's own influence and the top-tier technical team behind her.
Moreover, two key former colleagues have quietly joined—
One is Alec Radford, the first author of GPT, whom Altman calls an "Einstein-level genius"; the other is former OpenAI Chief Researcher Bob McGrew.
OpenAI's Former CTO's Startup Valuation to Reach $10 Billion
Last month, it was reported that they were seeking $1 billion in financing at a $9 billion valuation.
In just one month, the financing amount has doubled, and the valuation has also increased.
When Mira Murati's departure to start a business was first reported last October, it was already revealed that she had raised over $100 million (about 700 million yuan).
Although the specific details of how they will use this money are not clear, much information can be gleaned from their announcement two months ago.
At the time, they said they were working on creating a future where everyone can access knowledge and tools, allowing artificial intelligence to serve their unique needs and goals.
Especially in science and programming fields.
Because knowledge about how to train these systems is mainly concentrated in top research laboratories, which limits public discussion about artificial intelligence and people's ability to effectively use AI.
Based on this pain point, they want to bridge this gap—
They are building an AI that can adapt to all human professional knowledge.
To train such an intelligent model requires powerful infrastructure and advanced multi-modal capabilities.
Infrastructure is the key focus, especially maintaining its quality, which means the costs cannot be low.
Therefore, most of the $2 billion raised this time will be used for hardware procurement by the company.
However, this round of financing is "still in progress", and specific details may still change.
Two Big Shots Join
In addition, Thinking Machine Lab has gained two advisors, with impressive human resources.
They are all former OpenAI members, one being Alec Radford, the "genius boy" and first author of GPT; the other is former OpenAI Chief Researcher Bob McGrew.
Alec Radford joined OpenAI in 2016, and his name appears in papers from the first GPT to GPT-4o, being the first author for the first two generations.
Additionally, he was the first author of OpenAI's multi-modal model CLIP and the speech recognition model Whisper.
Before OpenAI, he graduated from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. According to netizens, it's a small, project-oriented engineering college with a reputation similar to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College.
Despite having only a bachelor's degree, he is absolutely a genius-level figure. Altman once called him an Einstein-level talent. To date, his papers have been cited over 200,000 times. The top three most-cited papers are related to GPT-3, CLIP, and GPT-2.
He left OpenAI at the end of last year to pursue independent research. At the time, Altman said he looked forward to collaborating with him.
Now, Mira has truly collaborated with him.
The other, Bob McGrew, joined OpenAI in 2017, with a bachelor's and doctoral degree from Stanford. Before joining OpenAI, he was an early executive at Palantir and an early employee at PayPal.
He was responsible for leading OpenAI's research, establishing the world's most powerful AI models, and then making these models accessible to the world through ChatGPT and API.
He left in September last year, saying he wanted to take a break.
Now, these former comrades are reunited, further enhancing Thinking Machine Lab's talent density.
In the previously announced 29-person top-tier team, two-thirds are from OpenAI, who have built some of the most widely used AI products—
Including ChatGPT, Character.ai, Mistral and other open-weight models, as well as popular open-source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything.
OpenAI's former Research (later Training) Vice President Barret Zoph serves as Thinking Machine Lab's CTO; OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the company's Chief Scientist.
Now with talent and funding secured, when can we expect a new product release?
Reference Links:
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/mira-murati-new-ai-startup-thinking-machines-funding-2025-4
[2]https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/08/mira-muratis-ai-startup-gains-prominent-ex-openai-advisers/
This article is from the WeChat public account "Quantum Bit", author: Bai Jiao, published by 36Kr with authorization.
