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Trajectory List
Explore roles, hiring trends, and funding at AI companies on breakout trajectories. Updated daily.

Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati (former OpenAI CTO), John Schulman (Chief Scientist, OpenAI co-founder), and Barrett Zoph (CTO, former OpenAI VP Research). Its mission is "collaborative general intelligence" — AI that understands and responds through text, audio, and vision simultaneously, rather than as modular add-ons. Its first live product is Tinker, a fine-tuning API that lets developers and researchers customize open-weights frontier models using their own data and training algorithms, while Thinking Machines manages the compute. In May 2026, the company previewed "interaction models" — a single-network architecture trained from the ground up to listen, speak, and see concurrently, achieving sub-500ms conversational turn-taking. Structured as a public benefit corporation, it publishes research openly and targets AI developers, enterprises, and the research community. Customers range from individual researchers to organizations wanting customized, on-brand frontier AI without building their own training infrastructure.

$12B post-money (seed, July 2025); $50–60B fundraise attempted Nov 2025, collapsed Jan 2026 valuation · 200 employees · 51 open roles

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