Thinking Machines Lab, a cutting-edge AI startup, has got Silicon Valley and the global AI landscape buzzing with its record-breaking $2 billion seed funding it raised during its first funding round held on June 21, 2025.
The amount raised is the first of its kind, especially for AI startups. This monumental raise is more than a funding round; it is the beginning of a new era of competition in the generative AI arms race, with key players betting big on what could be the next OpenAI or Anthropic.
About Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. The company has a high-profile team, drawing from the industry’s most prestigious organizations. Key members of the team include
- Mira Murati (Founder and CEO): Before Thinking Machines Lab, she was the CTO at OpenAI and played crucial roles in the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex.
- John Schulman: Chief Scientist at Thinking Machines Lab. Previously co-founder and head of alignment at OpenAI. He was a key player behind reinforcement learning with human feedback (RHLF), a method that aided ChatGPT’s ability to follow human instruction.
- Barret Zoph: Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Thinking Machines Lab. He was previously the VP of research at OpenAI, leading projects on model fine-tuning, post-training, and performance optimization for large language models (LLMs). Before OpenAI, he was a research scientist known for his work in neural architecture search (NAS) at Google Brain.
- Jonathan Lachman: Founding Head of Operations at Thinking Machines Lab, he was previously head of special projects at OpenAI, focused on cross-functional coordination between AI research, policy, and development.
- Lilian Weng: Co-founder and AI researcher at Thinking Machines Lab. She previously served as the VP of Research and Safety at OpenAI and helped launch the “o1-preview” model, which is OpenAI’s safest model to date.
The engineers, scientists, and builders in the Thinking Machines Lab are the cream of the crop. Most, if not all, have participated in/created products like ChatGPT, Character.ai, Mistral, Pytorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything.
Thinking Machines Lab is driven by three objectives: enhancing accessibility, promoting transparency, and advancing AI capabilities. The company is heavily focused on human-AI collaborations to build multimodal systems that are more flexible, adaptable, and personalized, while prioritizing AI safety.
Breaking Records: The 2B Seed Round
Let’s take a look at the big question, “How did Thinking Machines Lab make such an amount in a seed round?”
The seed round is the first official round of funding that a start-up raises from external investors to launch or grow its business. It typically holds after the start-up has developed an idea, prototype, or early product, and it usually raises around $100,000 to $5 million.
Thinking Machines Lab’s seed round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, a capital management team founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, both nicknamed “super angel” investors.
The round also had major participation from top-tier investors like Conviction Partners (a venture capital firm that focuses on AI start-ups), Accel (a leading venture capital firm that has invested in over 300 companies, including Facebook, Slack, and Dropbox), and the Albanian Government (Albania being Mira’s home country).
What Fueled the Funding?
Thinking Machines Lab is still in stealth mode and has no public product, demo, or prototype, so what fueled investors to invest? To start with, let’s take a look at the team behind Thinking Machines Lab. They all worked with well-known AI companies, with key players coming from OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT.
The team is also led by Mira Murati, who has made a name for herself in the AI industry while she was the CTO of OpenAI and her impact on ChatGPT, DALL-E, and ChatGPT voice mode.
Now, while there was no product or prototype, the investors believed in two things: talent and Mira’s vision for Thinking Machines Lab.
Mira has the credibility as the “mother” of ChatGPT, and her team is the best of the best. Her talent gave credibility to the vision of building general-purpose, multimodal AI with a strong focus on human-AI collaboration, transparency, and AGI-level (artificial general intelligence) capabilities.
Thinking Machines Lab’s seed round, even without a working prototype, was driven by vision, reputation, and future potential, which has led to a new milestone in the AI industry. The company has taken a bold step to stake its claim in defining the next generation of AI innovation, and its investors have placed one of the boldest early-stage bets in history.
