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The former director of Technology of OpenAI, Mira Murati, has raised $ 2 billion for her new artificial intelligence company, in an agreement that values the mysterious company of six months to $ 10 billion.
The agreement, which recently closed, according to several people familiar with the transaction, was one of the largest, or initial “seeds” financing rounds, in the history of Silicon Valley.
The Laboratory of Thoughts based in San Francisco had not declared what he was working on, instead, using Murati’s name and reputation to attract investors, they told those familiar with the collection of funds.
Andreessen Horowitz directed the round, with the participation of the conviction partners of Sarah Guo, those with knowledge of the agreement said.
Fund collection demonstrates the great appetite of investors in AI and faith in the vision of notable founders to compete with the tastes of OpenAi and Anthrope, as well as the great technological giants Google and Meta.
Murati, 36, went Openai in September, after having helped boost the creation of products such as Chatgpt, the Dall-E image generator and his voice mode. He had also been a senior products manager in Tesla, where he worked at Model X.
People with knowledge of the matter said it was one of the executives who had expressed concerns about Sam Altman’s leadership before a coup d’etat of the failed board to expel Openai executive director in November 2023. It was briefly named CEO interim before Altman was quickly restored.
Thinking Machines has also hired several former Operai employees, including co -founder John Schulman, former Special Projects Chief Jonathan Lachman and former Vice Presidents Barret Zoph and Lilian Weng.
“There is a true finite group of founders and incredibly intelligent people,” said an investor. “The united team (Murati) is convincing.”
However, there was little information about what the company is working on. In February, he said that it aimed to make “the systems of AI more widely understood, customizable and generally capable”, without providing more details.
Due to its highly clandestine nature, a series of funds that Murati launched to transmit the agreement, said multiple investors to whom they were addressed. One of these people added that the launch of Murati did not offer information about a product or financial plans.
Another person said that thought machines were working on “artificial general intelligence”, a hypothetical point where computers have similar or higher intelligence levels for humans. But they added that, at this time, the group was still “strategy.”
After the round of funds, Murati would maintain the voting rights of the Board that exceed all other combined directors, ensuring that she had the last word on all critical decisions in the company, people familiar with the agreement said. The voting information was first reported by the information.
The lack of product has not been able to dissuade investors to support the former co-founder of Openi, Ilya Sutskever, who raised $ 2 billion in April for its start-up Safe Superintelligence with an assessment of $ 32 billion.
The Laboratory of Thought Machines declined to comment.
