Thinking Machines Lab

01 · About

Founded 2025 · San Francisco, United States

Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence startup founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation. It employs about 100 people (as of 2026), including former OpenAI, Meta AI and Mistral AI staff. Founding members and key people include John Schulman (Chief Scientist), Lilian Weng and Barret Zoph. In July 2025 the company closed a seed round of about USD 2 billion led by Andreessen Horowitz at a USD 12 billion valuation; investors included NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, Jane Street and the government of Albania (USD 10 million). The first product was Tinker — an API for fine-tuning language models, announced on 1 October 2025. On 11 May 2026 the company unveiled the native interaction model TML-Interaction-Small (276B MoE, 12B active parameters).

Founders

Mira Murati
Founder and CEO
Albanian-American engineer, former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI (2022–2024). Founded Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025.
John Schulman
Chief Scientist
OpenAI co-founder, author of the PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) algorithm. Joined Thinking Machines Lab after a brief tenure at Anthropic.

02 · What they do

Domain of activity

3 areas

What they do3Areas

Language models
Multimodal models
AI platforms

03 · Geography

Global presence

HQ San Francisco · 2 regions

USAGlobal

04 · Metrics

Scale & funding

founded 2025 · Seed

2025founded

about 100 (2026)employees

$2Btotal funding

Seedlatest round

earlydevelopment stage

Privatenot listed

activestatus

$2B

total funding

1 · 2025

SeedJuly 2025Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), NVIDIA, AMD, Cisco, Jane Street, Government of AlbaniaSeed round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a USD 12 billion valuation. Albania invested USD 10 million following an amendment to its 2025 state budget.

USD 2 billion

05 · Portfolio

Products & solutions

1 ai models

TML-Interaction-Small

Natively interactive full-duplex 276B MoE model (12B active) from Thinking Machines Lab; processes audio, video and text in 200 ms micro-turns.

06 · Relations

Organizational relations

1 strategic relations

Strategic relations

Compute partner
NVIDIAMulti-year strategic partnership including an undisclosed NVIDIA investment and deployment of 1 GW of Vera Rubin compute capacity.
2026 →

07 · Classification

Profile & metadata

4 classification · 3 external links

Classification

Statusactive
Development stageearly
Listed onNoprivate
Organization typeStartup+ AI Lab

External links

08 · Related content

Articles

1 articles

News12 May 2026

Thinking Machines debuts: TML-Interaction-Small merges intelligence with real-time responsiveness

Mira Murati's startup has released its first foundational model — TML-Interaction-Small. The 276B-parameter MoE model is trained from scratch to handle audio, video, and text in 200-millisecond micro-turns, without any external dialog-management components.