Meet Mira Murati, the former OpenAI CTO raising $2 billion for her secretive AI startup

Mira Murati is the talk of Silicon Valley.

Murati made plenty of headlines in 2023 and 2024 amid the turmoil and brain drain at OpenAI. And in early 2025, she’s already grabbing more attention for raising a massive new round of funding for her new AI startup.

The 36-year-old is building Thinking Machines Lab, the secretive AI startup she launched in late 2024 after leaving OpenAI, where she served as chief technology officer. Murati hasn’t revealed many details on what the startup is developing, but in a recent blog post, shared that the company is developing AI models focused on human and AI collaboration.

Thinking Machines Lab is currently seeking $2 billion in seed funding, Business Insider first reported, which could be the largest seed round in history. The round could value the startup at more than $10 billion, two sources told BI.

In January 2025, BI reported that Murati’s startup was seeking $1 billion in seed funding at a $9 billion valuation.

A representative for Murati declined to comment for this story.

Murati was named to Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI in September 2024. That same year, Dartmouth College, her alma mater, awarded her an honorary doctor of science for her work democratizing tech and making it safer for people to use.

Prior to founding Thinking Machines Lab, Murati spent six and a half years at OpenAI and was its CTO from 2022 to 2024. When Sam Altman was briefly ousted as CEO of the AI startup in late 2023, Murati stepped in to lead the company on an interim basis. At OpenAI, Murati led the development of ChatGPT and the text-to-image model Dall-E.

Earlier in her career, Murati worked at Tesla and at augmented reality startup, Ultraleap.

Here’s a look at Murati’s life and career so far.

Mira Murati’s early life, education

Ermira “Mira” Murati was born in Vlorë, a coastal city in Southwestern Albania. She lived there until she was 16, when she won an academic scholarship to study at Pearson College, a two-year pre-college program in Victoria, British Columbia.

Murati participated in a dual-degree program that allows students to earn two degrees from two liberal arts schools in five years. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in 2011 and a Bachelor of Engineering from Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 2012.

After graduating from college, Murati interned at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo and French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace. She then spent three years at Tesla, where she was a product manager helping develop the Tesla Model X car. From 2016-2018, Murati worked at augmented reality startup LeapMotion, where she worked on replacing computer keyboards with the tech. LeapMotion is now known as Ultraleap.

Mira Murati’s career at OpenAI

Murati originally joined OpenAI in 2018 as the vice president of applied AI and partnerships. In December 2020, she became senior vice president of research, product and partnerships.

She was promoted to be CTO of the startup in May 2022, leading the company’s work to develop image generator DALL-E, video generator Sora, chatbot ChatGPT, and their underlying models.

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI’s board shocked the tech world by announcing that Altman was stepping down as CEO and as a member of the board, effective immediately. The board in a blog post said that it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” adding that Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications.”

Murati was named OpenAI’s interim CEO in his place, but the position didn’t last long: just one week after he was ousted, Altman was reinstated to OpenAI‘s top spot with new board members, and Murati said she fully supported Altman’s return.

Murati has become known for her more cautious approach to AI and has said she believes it should be regulated.

As far back as 2023, Murati acknowledged that there are dangers associated with AI, particularly when it comes to bad actors misusing the tech. In an interview, she told Time Magazine that it shouldn’t be up to OpenAI and other AI companies to self-regulate and that regulators and governments should “definitely” be involved to ensure that AI use is aligned with human values.

Following her brief time as interim CEO of OpenAI, Murati took on a more forward-facing role at the company. In May 2024, she helped to announce ChatGPT 4-o, the startup’s new flagship model that is faster than its predecessor and can reason across text, voice, and vision.

OpenAI also debuted a custom chatbot at the 2024 Met Gala, with Murati attending the exclusive event.

While weighing in on AI-driven job loss, Murati said that some creative jobs might go away, “but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” Her comments angered many, with one writer telling BI they represented “a declaration of war against creative labor.”

Mira Murati and Thinking Machines Lab

Murati departed OpenAI in September 2024, a move that surprised many people in the tech world.

Since departing, she’s quietly been working on her new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, which has captured the attention of many in Silicon Valley. While little is known so far about the startup, it is a research and product lab with the goal of making AI more accessible.

The startup officially emerged from stealth in February 2025.

She’s recruited a long list of former OpenAI staffers to Thinking Machines Lab. Ex-Meta and Anthropic employees have joined, too.

So far, Thinking Machines Lab employees from OpenAI include John Schulman, who co-led the creation of ChatGPT; Jonathan Lachman, formerly the head of special projects at OpenAI; Barret Zoph, a cocreator of ChatGPT; and Alexander Kirillov, who worked closely with Murati on ChatGPT’s voice mode.

In early 2025, BI reported that Thinking Machines Lab was raising a $1 billion round at a $9 billion valuation. In April 2025, BI reported that Murati doubled her target and was now seeking to raise a $2 billion round, which would be the biggest seed round in history. Two sources told BI that the round could value Thinking Machines Lab at more than $10 billion.

Mira Murati’s personal life

Little is known about Murati’s personal life, family, or relationships.

At the Cannes Lions Film Festival in 2024, Murati shared a humorous anecdote about her mother’s first interaction with ChatGPT was asking the chatbot when Murati would be getting married.

Murati told Time Magazine that the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey stirs her imagination, specifically, the movie’s imagery and music in the scene where the space shuttle docks.

The movie follows astronauts and an AI supercomputer as they journey to space to find the origin of a mysterious artifact. As the crew travels to the planet Jupiter, the computer tries to kill the astronauts.

Murati also told the magazine she likes the song Paranoid Android by Radiohead, as well as the book Duino Elegies, which is a poem collection by Rainer Maria Rilke.

A driving force for Murati’s work is achieving AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which is AI that mimics human abilities. AGI would be able to adapt to a broad range of tasks, teach itself new skills, and apply that knowledge to new situations.

The pursuit of this goal took Murati from Tesla, to Leapmotion, to OpenAI, she told WIRED in a 2023 interview.

“I very quickly believed that AGI would be the last and most important major technology that we built, and I wanted to be at the heart of it,” she said.

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