Mira Murati, the Albanian-born engineer who once ran technology at OpenAI, is closing in on one of the biggest funding rounds in Silicon Valley this year.
Business Insider reported this week that venture firm Accel plans to lead a new round for her company, Thinking Machines Lab, at a valuation of $40 billion before the new money comes in. That is more than three times the $12 billion the San Francisco start-up was worth in July 2025, when it raised $2 billion in one of the largest seed rounds in history.
The news came a day after the lab released Inkling 2 Small, the first model in its second generation of AI systems. The company is now bringing in at least a few hundred million dollars a year in revenue, according to The Information.
Murati was born in Vlorë in 1988 and left Albania as a teenager to study abroad. She graduated from Colby College and Dartmouth’s engineering school, then worked at Tesla and Leap Motion before joining OpenAI. There she became chief technology officer and oversaw the teams behind ChatGPT. In November 2023, she briefly served as the company’s interim CEO.
She left OpenAI in 2024 and launched Thinking Machines in February 2025. Less than two years later, it is one of the most closely watched AI labs in the world, and its founder is among the most powerful Albanians in American business.
