Thinking Machines Raises $2 Billion Amid AI Deal Boom

Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati’s startup Thinking Machines has just raised $2 billion.

The artificial intelligence (AI) company announced the funding Tuesday (July 15), saying it would help in its mission of building “multimodal” AI.

“We’re excited that in the next couple months we’ll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models,” Murati wrote in a post on X.

“Soon, we’ll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI systems.”

The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Nvidia and Cisco among the participating investors.

The announcement comes a little less than a month after a report by the Financial Times (FT) that Thinking Machines had secured a $2 billion funding deal, one of the largest ever seed rounds in Silicon Valley, valuing the firm at $10 billion.

Murati, the one-time chief technology officer for OpenAI, stepped down from that job in September, announcing the launch of her new company in February.

“Our goal is simple, advance AI by making it broadly useful and understandable through solid foundations, open science and practical applications,” Murati said at the time.

The FT report from June cited sources who said Murati was one of the executives who flagged concerns about the leadership of chief executive Sam Altman ahead of his short-lived ouster in 2023. She served briefly as interim CEO before Altman returned to the company.

Murati also played a key role in introducing OpenAI products like ChatGPT and DALL-E, PYMNTS wrote last fall.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke last week with Samuel Kerr, head of equity capital markets at Mergermarket, about the wave of record merger and acquisition (M&A) deals for AI startups.

Kerr told PYMNTS this is a common trend after a period of maturity in which larger companies would seek out smaller ones to absorb their technologies instead of building their own.

“You’re going to start to have the big winners start to acquire other technologies rather than doing it in-house,” Kerr said. “That’s the natural progression.”

The value of global M&A deals involving AI startups surged by 288% to $49.9 billion between 2023 and 2024, according to Mergermarket data shared with PYMNTS. The number of deals rose 53%, to 454. And compared to 2019, the number of deals has climbed by 130% while the deal value has ballooned by 730%.