A relatively new AI startup is making waves in the tech world, not due to advances it’s making in artificial intelligence, but because of the amount of capital it recently raised — a staggering $2 billion — with no product to show for it, CNBC reported.
“We have been working hard for the past 6 months on what I believe is the most ambitious multimodal AI program in the world,” said Alexander Kirillov, the head of multimodal research at Thinking Machines Lab, the company that secured the seven-figure round of funding.
A quiet launch with bold ambitions
Thinking Machines Labs was founded in February of this year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Since then, she has largely operated in stealth mode, keeping the company’s plans undisclosed.
“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world,” Murati finally revealed on July 16 on a post on X. “Through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.”
Record-breaking investment
While the company maintained a low profile to develop its AI platform, it simultaneously secured funding behind the scenes. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the $2 billion seed round, according to CNBC.
“To accelerate our progress, we’re happy to confirm that we’ve raised $2B led by a16z with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, AMD, Jane Street and more who share our mission,” Murati said in her post, acknowledging the companies that participated in the seed round.
The deal is also remarkable since it’s one of the largest first funding rounds in the history of Silicon Valley, as first noted by TechCrunch. In June, Thinking Machine Labs was reportedly valued at $10 billion, without having released a product, according to Financial Times.
Looking ahead: Open source and AI access
The unprecedented fundraise underscores investors’ eagerness to back the next major contender in AI. Murati wrote that her company would be able to share its new product “in the next couple months” and “will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models.”
This massive investment in a promising startup may help Thinking Machine Labs compete with AI model developers today, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, which have a stranglehold on the AI frontier.
“We believe AI should serve as an extension of individual agency and, in the spirit of freedom, be distributed as widely and equitably as possible,” Murati added.
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