| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | February 2025 in San Francisco, California |
| Founder | Mira Murati |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Key people |
|
| Products | AI systems and platforms |
Number of employees | 50 (2025) [1] |
| Website | thinkingmachines |
Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. [2] The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had already closed on an "outsized early-stage funding round" led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. [3] The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation. [4] [5]
By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitor Anthropic. [11] [12] Other former OpenAI employees who have been hired include Jonathan Lachman and Andrew Tulloch (although Tulloch departed after getting recruited for Meta Superintelligence Labs). [13] [14] Thinking Machines Lab's advisers include Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI's chief research officer, and Alec Radford, who was a lead researcher for OpenAI. [15] [16]
On 2025-10-01, it announced Tinker, an API for fine-tuning language models. Users would submit jobs through the API for fine-tuning one of the various open-weight models supported. The Lab would run the jobs on its internal clusters and training infrastructure. [17]
Thinking Machines Lab grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders. [18]
In July 2025, Andreessen Horowitz was reported to have led the company's initial funding round, raising "about $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion". [3] [19] The government of Albania (Murati's country of origin) was also included in this round, making a $10 million investment which required an amendment to the country's 2025 budget. [20] [21]
