From OpenAI to AI Innovator
Mira Murati is one of the few executives within AI to have been involved with some of the most pivotal moments in the space. An Albanian engineer, Mira moved from hardware and product roles to join OpenAI in 2018, eventually becoming CTO and overseeing the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E and Sora. Mira became acting CEO after Sam Altman was suddenly removed from his role by the board in November 2023, keeping the company together for a few days. Mira then left in September 2024 and has since developed a business directly tackling the industry.
A Founding Vision
Mira launched Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025 with a team of around thirty researchers and engineers (many from OpenAI and other top labs). The vision of the company was to provide a solution for people to customise models to their data and needs, provide more solid scientific grounding and to make research open source. Mira’s goal is to give more power to humans. “If you don’t want a generic model you should never feel like you have no choice.”
A World Record Seed Round
This was met with incredible enthusiasm. Mira raised a huge $$2 billion seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation of $12 billion in mid-2025. They have a stellar cap table full of names like Nvidia, AMD and Cisco. Many believe this is a rare team capable of competing with the top labs in the space. Others say it is a gamble based purely on reputation. While both are true, Mira knows that this will give her time to grow the company but also puts pressure on the company as few start-ups will ever have these expectations. The governance structure shows how confident they are, with Mira having a tie-breaking vote on board decisions.
Tinker: A Modest First Step
Their first product was launched in October 2025. This was not a chatbot or a frontier model. Tinker allows researchers and developers to customise open models. This allows users to fully control their data and algorithms, whilst the lab controls the infrastructure. This has been adopted by early adopters within university research groups for theorem proving and chemistry. Critics say it isn’t an exciting product but is very useful. It fits the vision perfectly but also provides the company with paying customers and a clear insight into what builders really want.
Some Hiccups
In late 2025 talks were being had about raising a new round of funding valued at around $50 billion. However, these talks are reported to have hit a snag by early 2026. Founders have started leaving the company. Several have moved to Meta. This is common in fast growing labs but as the company has a strong reputation for its team this has been noted. Mira has continued to deliver products and has hired new staff, including some big names like Soumith Chintala.
A Stronger Hand
In Spring 2026 they have made some big moves. In March Thinking Machines announced a partnership with Nvidia which includes investment and a multi-year deal to deploy 1 gigawatt of next generation compute. They also announced a deeper partnership with Google in April. In May they announced their interaction models. These allow continuous processing whilst the user is still talking. This is much closer to how humans talk. In July they released the weights from their multi-modal model Inkling. This can process text, image and audio, as well as a smaller version. Both models can be customised using Tinker. This company, who have been criticised for only doing tools, now have their own foundation model.
The Financials
In early September several sources reported that the company was in talks to raise new funding. This would value the company at around $40 billion. Nvidia are reported to be considering a large investment. The amount varies between around $1 billion to several billion. As of now, this has not been confirmed. Mira has become more well known, appearing on Time’s list of the most influential people in AI this year.
Can the vision work? Open models with customisation capabilities are appealing to businesses who don’t want to rely on a few providers. However, they need to keep up with the closed models who will have much more resources. They need to show they can compete with the scale of the models.
An Interesting Philosophical Angle
While Mira’s story is often portrayed by large valuations, people leaving and big headlines, the more interesting angle is the philosophy. She is betting that the future of AI will be diverse and will be influenced by those using it. If she is correct then Thinking Machines Lab will be recognised as one of the first to help shape the future. If she is incorrect then they will have at least made the industry consider choice. As Mira was once holding the most scrutinised AI company in the world together this is very fitting.
