Mira Murati

Mira Murati raised $2B for her startup… before launching a single product.

As CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati helped shape ChatGPT, DALL·E, and Codex.

When the company hit a leadership crisis in 2023, she stepped in as interim CEO.

Then, in 2024, she made a decision no one expected: she left.

In February 2025, Mira launched Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation with one big mission: to build AI that’s safer, more customizable, and actually understood by the people using it.

She started with a team of 30.

Not just any 30… engineers and researchers from OpenAI, Meta, Mistral, DeepMind, and Character.ai.

John Schulman, OpenAI’s cofounder, joined her.

Alec Radford and Bob McGrew signed on as advisors.

By April, investors were lining up.

Andreessen Horowitz led a $2 billion round.

Nvidia, AMD, Accel, Cisco, ServiceNow, Jane Street joined in.

Valuation? $12 billion.

But in October, her team dropped their first product: Tinker, a tool that helps researchers and startups build their own AI models from scratch.

With open-source options built in.