Thinking Machines Lab

Quick read

Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded in February 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, it raised a record $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation within its first five months. It's best known for Tinker, a fine-tuning API for developers, and a May 2026 research preview of Interaction Models, a native multimodal architecture capable of 0.4-second response times.

Key facts

Founded

February 2025

Founders

Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, Andrew Tulloch

Employees

169

Sectors

ai

Website

thinkingmachines.ai/

Mission

Build AI systems that are more understandable, customizable, and capable of real-time multimodal collaboration with humans, operating as a public benefit corporation.

Recent activity

• May 2026product
  Unveiled Interaction Models, a native multimodal architecture for real-time human-AI collaboration with sub-0.4-second response times; opened a limited research preview to collect feedback ahead of a broader 2026 release. theaiinsider.tech
• Apr 2026leadership
  Meta hired a fifth founding member, including cofounder Andrew Tulloch, bringing the total founding-team departures to roughly 13 of the original 42 people. businessinsider.com
• Mar 2026fundraise
  Announced a long-term strategic partnership with NVIDIA, including an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity. axios.com
• Feb 2026leadership
  Hired Soumith Chintala, creator of PyTorch at Meta, as CTO, replacing the prior CTO role following the January leadership departures. businessinsider.com
• Feb 2026leadership
  Hired Neal Wu, a three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist, in an undisclosed technical role. businessinsider.com
• Jan 2026leadership
  Co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, plus researcher Sam Schoenholz, departed to rejoin OpenAI; Zoph was reportedly dismissed by Murati before immediately signing with OpenAI. The all-hands meeting held to address the exits prompted further on-the-spot resignations. nytimes.com
• Oct 2025product
  Released Tinker, its debut product — an API that lets developers fine-tune open-source language models without managing distributed computing infrastructure. builtin.com
• May 2025fundraise
  Raised a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation from investors including Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, the largest seed round on record at the time. wired.com

Key people

Named individuals at the firm. We don't expose direct email or phone — use their LinkedIn for outreach.

• Mira Murati · Co-Founder & CEO
  Brief →
• Anna Goldie · CTO
• John Schulman · Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
• Barret Zoph · Co-founder & CTO
• Lilian Weng · Co-founder
• Andrew Tulloch · Co-founder

Sources

• Inside Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's New AI Startup | Built In
• Thinking Machines Lab Raises a Record $2 Billion | WIRED
• Thinking Machines Lab commits to a gigawatt of Nvidia compute | Axios
• Thinking Machines Lab Unveils Full-Duplex AI | The AI Insider
• The Drama at Thinking Machines, a New A.I. Start-Up | NYT
• Thinking Machines Lab Sees Key Talent Leave for Meta, OpenAI, XAI | Business Insider
• Meta has snapped up a fifth founding member from Thinking Machines Lab | Business Insider
• Thinking Machines Lab - Wikipedia

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