Thinking Machines Lab
American artificial intelligence company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI.[2] The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had completed an early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street.[3] The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation.[4][5]
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
| Founded | February 2025 in San Francisco, California |
| Founder | Mira Murati |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Key people |
|
| Products | AI systems and platforms |
Number of employees | 100 (2026)[1] |
| Website | thinkingmachines |
History
By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI.[6][7][8][9][10] Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitor Anthropic.[11][12][13]
In January 2026, it was reported that Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, departed the startup to return to OpenAI.[14]
Other former OpenAI employees who have been hired include Jonathan Lachman and Andrew Tulloch (although Tulloch departed after getting recruited for Meta Superintelligence Labs).[15][16] Thinking Machines Lab's advisers include Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI's chief research officer, and Alec Radford, who was a lead researcher for OpenAI.[17][18]
In March 2026, Thinking Machines Lab announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA involving an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity.[19][20]
Products
On October 1, 2025, Thinking Machines Lab announced Tinker, an API for fine-tuning language models. Users would submit jobs through the API for fine-tuning one of the various open-weight models supported. The Lab would run the jobs on its internal clusters and training infrastructure.[21]
Thinking Machines Lab released its large language model Inkling on July 15, 2026, under the Apache License.[22] The model was partially trained using data from Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5 model.[23] Media outlets described Inkling as an American alternative to existing open-weights models, noting that the most competitive open-weights models at the time were largely developed by Chinese AI firms.[24][25][26]
Inkling Small, a 276-billion parameter model with comparable performance to Inkling, was released by the company on July 31, 2026.[27]
Business structure
Thinking Machines Lab grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders.[28]
In July 2025, Andreessen Horowitz was reported to have led the company's initial funding round, raising "about $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion".[3][29][30] The government of Albania (Murati's country of origin) was also included in this round, making a $10 million investment which required an amendment to the country's 2025 budget.[31][32]
