Mira Murati, the Albanian-American former CTO of OpenAI, just announced a massive $2 billion funding round for her new AI startup Thinking Machines Lab.

After making global headlines in 2023 as interim CEO of OpenAI, Murati left the company in September and quietly launched her own venture in February. Now, she’s back with big backing — the funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and included tech giants like Nvidia, AMD, Accel, ServiceNow, CISCO, and Jane Street.

Murati said the company will release its first product “in the next couple months” with a focus on multimodal AI — technology that can interact through both vision and conversation, mimicking how people naturally engage with the world. Part of the product will be open source, designed to support researchers and other AI startups.

“We believe AI should serve as an extension of individual agency and be distributed as widely and equitably as possible” Murati said.

She also promised to share more of the company’s “best science” to help the research community better understand advanced AI systems.