Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's $2B AI Startup Thinking Machines Lab Sets $50M Investment Minimum, Backed By Andreessen Horowitz And Sequoia Capital
Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI and a central figure behind ChatGPT, is launching her own AI startup, and she's doing it in blockbuster fashion.
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI company founded by Murati early this year, is raising a $2 billion seed round at a $10 billion valuation.
According to Business Insider, the round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, with support from Sequoia Capital and other top-tier investors. Those interested in backing the venture are being asked to commit a minimum of $50 million per check, a staggering requirement for what would be one of the largest seed rounds in startup history.
Don't Miss:
'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones.
Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing —
The startup's ambition is to reshape the way artificial intelligence is built and understood. According to the company's website, Thinking Machines Lab will focus on making AI 'more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable,' highlighting a shift toward both transparency and user control.
That positioning places the company in direct conceptual competition with AI giants like OpenAI, Google's Gemini, Elon Musk's xAI, and Anthropic, which are all currently racing to define the next generation of large language models and autonomous systems, Business Insider reported.
Murati spent more than six years at OpenAI, contributing to the development of ChatGPT and other advanced AI research projects. According to Business Insider, she was briefly appointed interim CEO in November 2023, after the board unexpectedly removed Sam Altman, a decision that triggered internal upheaval across the company. Following Altman's reinstatement just days later, Murati returned to her position as chief technology officer.
Trending: Nancy Pelosi Invested $5 Million In An AI Company Last Year —
Andreessen Horowitz, the legendary venture capital firm that previously backed Facebook and Airbnb (NASDAQ:ABNB), Financial Times reported, is leading the round alongside Sequoia Capital, known for its investments in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), and WhatsApp, Fortune says. Their involvement may signal strong institutional belief in Murati's long-term potential.
Thinking Machines Lab is also assembling a brain trust of former OpenAI engineers and scientists. According to The Founders Magazine, team members include Bob McGrew, former head of research at OpenAI, Alec Radford, one of the minds behind the original GPT, Barret Zoph, a top researcher on ChatGPT, and John Schulman, co-lead of the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback technique that powers modern AI safety.Few early-stage startups command minimum investments in the tens of millions. According to Business Insider, Murati's $50 million threshold is a practical necessity since training large models and building scalable infrastructure requires capital on a massive scale.
If the raise closes as expected, Thinking Machines Lab will stand beside OpenAI and Anthropic as one of the most well-capitalized AI startups in the world, Business Insider says, and one of the only ones led by a woman.
With technical vision, elite backing, and a mission to open up the black box of AI, Murati's next chapter may reshape the way the world builds and interacts with intelligent systems.
Read Next:Deloitte's fastest-growing software company partners with Amazon, Walmart & Target – Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market.
Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga?
APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report
TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report
This article Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's $2B AI Startup Thinking Machines Lab Sets $50M Investment Minimum, Backed By Andreessen Horowitz And Sequoia Capital originally appeared on Benzinga.com
© 2025 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
8 minutes ago
- Forbes
Tariff Uncertainties, Part 4: A Little Q&A (Maybe It's About China?)
(Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images) This Spring, economists everywhere, amateur and professional, got a new study assignment: tariffs. An old-school, back-burner policy issue, the tariff question jumped out of the history books (the McKinley presidency, Smoot-Hawley 1930, etc.) and onto the front pages here in 2025. 'Liberation Day' created such a storm of controversy that, like so many of us, I was diverted from other plans and forced to deal with it, to learn the vocabulary, to recall the history, and to pick apart the complex uncertainties. The result for me has been three installments so far (here, here and here) with several more to come, I expect. In writing for Forbes, my general principle is to avoid editorializing (there is certainly more than enough of that out there) but the new tariff proposals are so bewildering that inevitably many of my friends and correspondents have wanted to know 'What-I-Think'. And so – A couple weeks ago I got a query from a reporter, who posed a number of questions about the Trump administration's tariff gambit – which I tried in good faith to answer, based on the current and highly imperfect state of my knowledge of the subject. It occurred to me afterwards that these brief and relatively unencumbered responses might serve as a preliminary and partial statement of my conclusions about some of this. One of the questions cited below referenced a recent and now quite widely cited paper by Stephen Miran, formerly of Hudson Bay Capital and now Trump's choice as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. Titled 'A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,' it puts forward a provocative thesis: because the dollar is in effect the world's reserve currency, it is overvalued due to 'inelastic demand' for dollar-denominated reserve assets by foreign central banks and many others. In other words, there are many economic actors globally who need to hold dollars for various reasons unrelated to the real economic value of our currency or our economy. These buyers are willing to pay a premium to acquire dollar reserves, and the price of the dollar is bid up. This creates trade imbalances because U.S. dollar-priced exports are overvalued and become uncompetitive, whereas U.S. consumers' dollar-priced purchasing power for undervalued foreign imports is stimulated. QED, growing trade deficits. Miran's thesis invites a much more substantive assessment than what is provided here. In a future column, I expect to address the general question of 'elastic' or, as I prefer to call it, 'price-insensitive' demand for Treasury Bonds, which is a larger subject than the trade policy perspective alone would suggest. So what follows is the colloquial Q&A, more or less unedited, from my email exchange with that reporter. It may be in some respects clearer, and more concise, than the analyses comprising the more substantive columns mentioned above. (The reporter's questions are in bold.) I think it is best to assume that Yes, there is a plan – rather than dismissing it all because it may look disorganized or haphazard. Trump's tactical modus operandi is to keep people guessing and off balance. This studied unpredictability may be confusing to many and annoying to some, and perhaps it is intended to confuse and annoy. It certainly overturns the traditional 'diplomacy' model of patient, dignified, long-term multi-lateral convocations of bureaucrats laboring over detailed trade agreements (e.g., the 'Uruguay round' - which involved representatives from 123 countries, working for 7½ years, to produce 26,000 pages of trade agreement documentation – or the subsequent 'Doha Round' which has been grinding away since 2001 without reaching a conclusion). As to what that endgame is — My best guess is that Trump actually would prefer to end up with a global trade regime based on low and balanced tariffs. At the G7 summit in Canada in 2018, he shocked the other world leaders by calling for the elimination of all tariffs and trade barriers – 'No tariffs, no barriers. That's the way it should be' — I think he wants to equalize or 'reciprocalize' the trade landscape among major trading partners. (China may be an exception.) In any case, I think the era where the U.S. runs a kind of parallel Marshall plan by allowing highly asymmetric trade arrangements to continue is coming to an end, one way or another. I think the principal long-term financial impact will be on the value of the dollar. Traditional trade theory would say that as the U.S. tariffs are imposed the dollar should appreciate and exporting countries' currencies should depreciate. This is what happened with the first round of Trump tariffs in 2018. The dollar gained strength and the Chinese Yuan (for example) devalued. However, the initial currency movements now are in the opposite direction — a somewhat weaker dollar and some appreciation of currencies like the Korean Won and the Taiwanese dollar (which has been the most severely undervalued currency in the world). This would suggest that a strategic re-alignment of exchange rates may be underway, which would address the issues raised in the Stephen Miran paper (see below, Question 4). Some have said that the dollar's reserve currency status may be affected, perhaps diminished somewhat – which would have many ramifications, including a rise in the cost to the U.S. for financing its deficits. I'm not sure about that. Capital outflows from China are the thing to watch most closely. Unlike the other major currencies, the Chinese currency has not appreciated significantly since Liberation Day and is at or near its lowest point since 2007. Initially it dropped in value, and has recovered only a little, apparently with massive help from Beijing. Gain in value of major currencies vs the USDollar, April 1 to May 23 2025 The struggling economy in China, the effects of tariffs imposed by the U.S., the EU, Canada, and just about every other country in the world restricting Chinese exports, along with other domestic constraints will put pressure on the Yuan — and as it depreciates, capital flight risk will intensify. It is difficult to measure, especially given China's steady elimination of statistical measures related to the economy, but by most accounts capital has been draining from the country since 2020, and the pace is accelerating. This is the most serious risk for the Chinese regime right now, I believe. It is also probably the most important long-term effect of the tariff war. Capital Flight from China accelerating Miran's is a very important paper, with many interesting observations. I would simplify the basic argument as follows: just as the massive purchases of Treasury bonds by the Federal Reserve in course of the various rounds of quantitative easing drove up the price of Treasury bonds (duh!), the massive accumulation of dollars (and Treasurys) by foreign govts and others will have the same effect. Both sources of demand are price-insensitive – the purchasers have other reasons to want or need to hold dollars or Treasurys and don't care about the price per se. From this insight — which is so obvious once it is stated that I am chagrinned not to have made the connection myself! – many other interesting corollary observations flow. Short answer is No. Smoot-Hawley happened almost a century ago, in a very different economy, both in the U.S. and globally, and has no real bearing on tariff policy today. [Much more to say on that, for a future column perhaps – but the conclusion is solid.] This may well be the end of the WTO as we know it. The WTO was created to put order in the global trading economy. It was born out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system, which was itself born out of the post-war 'Marshall Plan for trade' regime alluded to above [and described in detail in my first Tariff column]. The WTO is a manifestation of geopolitical idealism. But it has failed to create or manage a fair trade regime, despite its high aspirations. The proliferation of non-tariff trade barriers in particular has raged on, with the level of complaints surging from many countries (not just the U.S.), and mostly aimed at China. The Chinese have made it clear that they are going to follow a protectionist path (a self-sufficiency model, they might call it) ever since the unveiling (in 2015) of the 'China 2025' plan. The WTO should be revamped, or replaced, by a new regime with real enforcement powers, and the will to exercise them against bad actors. Well, we should begin any answer to that question by defining our terms. If globalization refers to the current highly asymmetric international trade regime, rife with not just tariff imbalances but massive currency manipulation and even more significant levels of government subsidy for 'national champions' to provide competitive advantages… well, yes, I think that form of globalization is on the way out. And to the extent that globalization focuses on manufacturing, that too is going to change. One thing that is under-commented generally is the role of services in global trade. As manufacturing (in the West) follows the path of agriculture downward in terms of employment and GDP share, due to inexorable technological progress, and we become even more committed to a service economy, the nature of 'globalization' will surely evolve. 'Fairness' will have different manifestations. And 'global trade as fair trade' — that high ideal is gestating, and it is hard to say exactly how it might emerge as a concrete reality. A truck passes by China Shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles, after new tariffs on Chinese ... More imports was imposed by President Trump, in Long Beach, California on September 1, 2019. - Washington moved ahead Sunday with new tariffs on Chinese imports as it stepped up a high-pressure campaign aimed at coercing Beijing to sign a new trade deal even amid fears of a further slowing of US and world growth. (Photo by Mark RALSTON / AFP) (Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images) China is going to be the center stage of the next phase of global trade policy. Behind all the sound and fury attending Trump and his Liberation Day antics, there is a sober consensus cohering in the West (and Japan, Korea, India, even SE Asia) that China is the real problem for global trade. Tariffs against Chinese imports are going into place all over the world. The country's massive export subsidies, over-production, gross dumping policies, currency manipulation, and numerous forms of bad economic misbehavior are eliciting protectionist responses almost everywhere, which will crimp China's ability to stimulate its flagging economy through its accustomed export-driven channels. A weakening Yuan and accelerating capital flight will push them to the edge. China is in the weakest position to survive a trade war without serious consequences.
Forbes
8 minutes ago
- Forbes
Stock Market: Companies Are Struggling With Inflation-Driven Consumers
Inflation has altered consumers' buying habits Year-to-year inflation may look low, but prices continue to compound upwards. For example, "Food at home" pricing, accounting for 8% of the total CPI basket, was up 1.8% in 2024. That seemingly low inflation rate nevertheless pushed up the Covid period price inflation to 27.6%, and that is what consumers are contending with. So, why is that a problem for companies? Because consumers' actions to reduce the inflationary effects can adversely affect business revenues and profits. Grocery shopping is a good example. Here are examples of what consumers can do: These actions not only affect the grocery stores, but also affect the companies that produce packaged food. The effect is measured by 'volume/mix' changes caused by consumers' altered decisions. In last year's 2023 annual reporting, Kraft's management anticipated 2024 growth from rises in both sales and prices. However, consumers tripped up the company's strategies and expectations. From the 2024 Annual Report: Note the higher pricing was well below the 2024 CPI inflation rate of almost 3%. So, how did Wall Street view Kraft's 2024 results and plans? Not well. Below is the stock's performance for the Covid-period. Note that the company (and others like it) was able to produce inflation-beating results early, but then the consumer actions began to hit, causing a reversal of the previous gains. With the consumer shifts continuing to hit results in 2025, the stock has now fallen below the cumulative inflation, making the Covid-period "real" (inflation-adjusted) stock performance negative. Kraft Heinz Covid-period stock performance (including dividends) now below cumulative CPI While the Federal Reserve focuses on the latest 12-month change in prices, it is the cumulative inflation damage that consumers focus on. After all, a "good" 12-month inflation change of 'only' 3% nevertheless compounds high prices even higher. The Covid-period rise is now about 23%. That level of inflation continues to cause damage, particularly in this period of high uncertainty (see "Uncertainties Are Churning U.S. Stock Market Outlooks" for explanation of why uncertainty can be more troublesome than risk). Here are the S&P 500's nine companies in the sector/industry combination of the normally safe consumer defensive/ packaged foods. They all got an inflation boost early but are now struggling with both higher costs and changing consumer buying actions. The weak and negative "real" (inflation-adjusted) total returns for the Covid period show Wall Street's bearish views of the situation and the outlook. Double-digit negative real performance shows inflation's continuing problems In the early 1970s when inflation was a similar concern, I read an interview with a wealthy individual. He made a surprising statement, saying he would happily give up half his wealth if the other half was guaranteed to retain its value. Why was he willing to make such a large payout? Because inflation has a potentially destructive power that can become self-sustaining, even as economic, business, and financial conditions deteriorate. It is what happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Fox News
8 minutes ago
- Fox News
Trump posts video thanking Elon Musk as billionaire ends White House tenure
Print Close By Rachel Wolf Published May 31, 2025 The Trump White House released a video on Friday marking the end of Elon Musk's time working with the administration. The billionaire has been leading the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) since January. The video, which was posted on multiple social media platforms, is a highlight reel, starting with Musk's endorsement of President Donald Trump in July 2024, just after the then-candidate was nearly assassinated, and goes up to his last day in D.C. WHITE HOUSE DISCLOSES WHO WILL LEAD DOGE EFFORTS AFTER MUSK'S DEPARTURE In addition to the video, the White House published several posts on X thanking Musk for his service, including a list of "DOGE Wins," which include saving American taxpayers $170 billion, canceling approximately 523,000 active U.S. government credit cards/accounts it uncovered in an audit, cleaning up records at the Social Security Administration, among other initiatives. During a joint news conference on Friday, Trump awarded Musk a "key to the White House." The White House quoted the president as saying that "Elon's delivered a colossal change in the old ways of doing business in Washington… Elon Musk's service to America has been without comparison in modern history." WHAT'S NEXT FOR DOGE AFTER ELON MUSK'S DEPARTURE? 'ONLY JUST BEGUN' Another Republican leader joined Trump in recognizing the changes Musk worked to implement in Washington. House Speaker Mike Johnson thanked Musk for his "selfless, patriotic service" and praised both the billionaire and DOGE, saying they "dug through the bureaucracy and shined a light on MASSIVE waste, fraud, and abuse." "They have saved the American people BILLIONS of dollars, and are updating old and inefficient systems across the federal government — all while providing Republicans with a list of targets of pointless programs that Congressional action will address." MUSK OFFICIALLY STEPS DOWN FROM DOGE AFTER WRAPPING WORK STREAMLINING GOVERNMENT CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP While some wonder about the future of DOGE, the Trump administration is insisting that the department will go on without Musk at the helm. The Tesla founder addressed this question as well just as Trump marked 100 days in office. He told a small group of reporters that "DOGE is a way of life, like Buddhism. You wouldn't ask who would lead Buddhism. Is Buddha needed for Buddhism?" A few days before the end of his White House tenure, Musk vowed in a post on X to go "back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms," a big switch from the Lincoln Bedroom, where the billionaire allegedly slept multiple times. However, Trump teased that even though it was Musk's last day, it wasn't "really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way." Print Close URL
