Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has closed a record-breaking $2 billion seed round, valuing the company at $12 billion, marking one of Silicon Valley’s largest initial financings to date TechCrunch.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included key strategic partners such as Nvidia, AMD, Accel, Cisco, and Jane Street, as confirmed by Reuters and the Financial Times FT.

Mira Murati, valued for her leadership on tools like ChatGPT, DALL‑E, and Codex as OpenAI CTO, emphasized that the company is focused on creating multimodal AI that interfaces with humans through conversation, sight, and collaborative workflows. She teased the launch of the first product—featuring an open‑source component—within the upcoming months TechCrunch reports.

Previously operating in stealth—to assemble a top-tier team including colleagues like John Schulman and Barrett Zoph—Thinking Machines has now stepped into the spotlight with this headline round. The firm is structured as a public-benefit corporation and is already recruiting aggressively to build large-scale research and grading infrastructure Reuters.

Why it matters: A $12 billion seed valuation dramatically elevates expectations. With heavy-hitting backers and an open-source mission, Thinking Machines sets a new benchmark for early-stage AI ventures. Its emphasis on multimodal interaction and human-AI collaboration positions it to potentially rival OpenAI, Anthropic, and others in defining the next generation of intelligent systems.