Mira Murati closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation for Thinking Machines Lab on July 15, 20251. That is enough money to run a mid-size public company, attached to a startup still years from a shipped product. Ten months later, a third of her founding team had left for rivals2. The pay war she left OpenAI to escape had followed her. A pattern repeats across a small set of labs built on one scientist's reputation. Huge capital arrives first. Then the market for the people who justify that capital tests whether the founder's pull holds.
Murati's Team Learns What Nine Figures Buys
Thinking Machines drew heavily from OpenAI at its founding, and the roughly 150-person company has more than quadrupled since, per American Bazaar2. Growth hid an exodus underneath. Three of six co-founders left. Meta recruited seven founding-team members plus one more star researcher, OpenAI reclaimed five, and xAI took one. Departures sped up once the one-year vesting cliff passed, the exact moment a rival's cash beats unvested equity. Engineer Joshua Gross, who helped build the company's flagship product Tinker "from zero to one," left after shipping it. Co-founder Andrew Tulloch departed for Meta Superintelligence Labs on Oct. 12, 2025.
Meta recruited 8 people from Thinking Machines, more than OpenAI's 5 and xAI's 1 combined
Thinking Machines Lab staff recruited by rivals, by destination, per American Bazaar, one cube per person
Each cube is one person who left Thinking Machines for a rival: magenta cubes went to Meta, blue cubes went back to OpenAI, and the gray cube went to xAI.
Source: American Bazaar [2]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Recruited by Meta | 8 | Seven founding-team members plus one more star researcher |
| Reclaimed by OpenAI | 5 | |
| Taken by xAI | 1 |
Plain dollar figures explain most of it. Recruiters pitched ordinary Thinking Machines staff on packages starting near $1.5 million in cash2. The company itself advertised $350,000 to $475,000. Offers to senior founding members reportedly reached "well into nine figures". Lilian Weng, another prominent researcher, left to rejoin OpenAI on July 30, 2026, in a departure reported alongside health struggles rather than a counteroffer3. Pay explains most of the exits. A smaller share traces to personal reasons, and that matters for anyone reading Murati's roster as a pure money story.
Sutskever Bets on Patience Instead of Product
Safe Superintelligence took the opposite path. Ilya Sutskever founded it on June 19, 2024, and had raised $1 billion by September5. Its value reached $32 billion on a $2 billion round reported April 13, 2025, built on Sutskever's standing as OpenAI's former chief scientist. Co-founder Daniel Gross left for Meta Superintelligence Labs in July 2025. Sutskever stood alone at the top, in the same season as the round that made SSI one of the world's most valuable startups still waiting on a product.
Several 2026 trackers still list SSI as product-free, a company worth tens of billions on a research bet4. Nvidia backed that bet on July 27, 2026, with an investment Bloomberg put near $5 billion, plus access to its newest GPU platform. Sutskever framed the wager himself. "We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so. We are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level." Read what he asks for. Compute, twice, and a product zero times.
Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed, GV and Sequoia fill out the investor list4. That roster spreads across every other lab's approach rather than backing one design. SSI's bet is patience. Skip revenue, skip a public model, and let the research mature on an investor's clock. The approach survives only while those investors keep believing the wait pays off, and every one of them is waiting on a date SSI declines to give.
Discovery Loop Tests the Formula at Google's Scale
A group exit built the next entrant, rather than one celebrity founder, though the group carries celebrity weight. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le left Google on Aug. 5, 2026 to found Discovery Loop6. They chase automated, self-repeating discovery systems, close to the work all four did inside Google. Their founding statement set the goal in one line. "The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries." Alphabet backed the new company, turning a talent loss into a stake, a move Google used elsewhere as exits sped up through 2026.
Four peers founded Discovery Loop together, which differs from Murati's and Sutskever's setups in a way that matters. It splits the risk a single name carries alone. Set that against Thinking Machines' churn, and having many founders works as its own retention tool. A rival recruiter has to move a whole group, rather than pick off people one bonus at a time.
LeCun and the Physical-World Wager
Yann LeCun left Meta on Nov. 20, 2025 and founded AMI Labs, which closed a $1.03 billion seed round on March 9, 2026 at a $3.5 billion valuation7. The investor list runs from Cathay Innovation, Greycroft and Hiro Capital to Bezos Expeditions, Nvidia, Samsung and Temasek. Angels include Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee, Mark Cuban and Eric Schmidt. LeCun took the chairman title rather than chief executive, handing daily command to Alexandre LeBrun, formerly of Nabla and Meta's FAIR group. Laurent Solly, Meta's former Europe vice president, runs operations.
AMI's bet targets world models, systems built to learn from the physical world rather than text alone7. LeCun argued for that direction years before Meta's plans moved elsewhere. LeBrun added a warning about the crowd he is joining. "Every company will call itself a world model to raise funding" within months, he said, placing AMI's difference in substance rather than vocabulary.
Periodic Labs and Reflection AI complete the set, with less fame and the same speed. Former OpenAI and Google Brain researchers founded Periodic around an AI-for-science thesis8. It entered talks near a $7 billion valuation by March 25, 2026, per Bloomberg. Reflection AI, founded by former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou to build open models, sought investors above $20 billion by March 2, 20269. That is up from $8 billion on a round closed in October 2025. Both raised on team pedigree well ahead of commercial proof.
Five scientist-led labs carry valuations from $3.5 billion to $32 billion, with Thinking Machines at $12 billion
Valuation in each lab's latest round or talks the piece reports, billions of dollars
Each bar is one lab's valuation: the magenta bar is the Thinking Machines seed round, blue bars are other closed rounds, and gray bars are prices in talks.
Sources: Reuters (via TradingView) [1]; Calcalist (CTech) [5]; TechCrunch [7]; Bloomberg [8]; Roic [9]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Safe Superintelligence | $32B | A $2 billion round reported April 13, 2025 |
| Reflection AI, sought | $20B | Above $20 billion in talks reported March 2, 2026, up from $8 billion |
| Thinking Machines Lab | $12B | A $2 billion seed round, July 15, 2025 |
| Periodic Labs, in talks | $7B | Near $7 billion as of March 25, 2026 |
| AMI Labs | $3.5B | A $1.03 billion seed round, March 9, 2026 |
What the Formula Actually Buys
Investors here price a person, or a small group, rather than a product plan, a customer base, or in several cases a working prototype. That packs the risk in a way ordinary venture math rarely allows. Lose the founder and the valuation's base goes too. Thinking Machines shows the risk runs deeper, because a founder staying put guarantees little about the team around her. Murati kept her seat. A third of the people she recruited chose a rival's.
Reflection AI, Periodic Labs and AMI Labs have avoided comparable public churn so far. Each is younger than Thinking Machines, and each has yet to pass the one-year vesting cliff where Murati's exits clustered. Discovery Loop's four founders offer one hedge6. Sutskever's patience offers another, on a bet that a team drawn to a long research horizon sorts itself away from recruiters chasing fast money4. Whether either hedge holds through 2027 will say more about this model than any funding round has.
Sutskever answered the central question directly days after Daniel Gross left for Meta in June 2025, once acquisition rumors reached SSI's own investors. He told the company's team and investors the departure left the mission exactly where it stood. "We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence," Sutskever wrote, according to TechCrunch10. Read against May's one-in-three figure at Thinking Machines, SSI's single public departure in two years backs his claim with a number rather than a slogan.
Peter Deng, a former OpenAI vice president of consumer product who is now a general partner at Felicis, pointed to compensation as the variable deciding who stays, ahead of reputation. Deng raised the point on the Unsupervised Learning podcast in August 2025, warning that the gap carries consequences beyond any single founder's control. "I think it does have second-order effects. There are some people who are not researchers who feel like they're contributing a bunch to the product or the company or bringing a ton of value, but the discrepancy in salaries and RSUs and all that is becoming wider and wider," Deng said11. Human resources teams, he added, will eventually address the split.
By the numbers
- Thinking Machines Lab reached a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round announced July 15, 20251.
- One third of the six-person founding team had left by May 20262.
- Recruiters reportedly offered a $1.5 million cash floor to rank-and-file staff, against an advertised $350,000-to-$475,000 band2.
- Safe Superintelligence reached a $32 billion valuation on a $2 billion round reported April 13, 20255.
- Nvidia's reported investment in Safe Superintelligence, announced July 27, 2026, approached $5 billion4.
- AMI Labs closed a $1.03 billion seed round on March 9, 2026, at a $3.5 billion valuation7.
- Periodic Labs entered deal talks near a $7 billion valuation as of March 25, 20268.
- Reflection AI sought a valuation above $20 billion in talks reported March 2, 20269.
What to watch
Thinking Machines' Tinker product will show whether a steadier headcount still ships at Murati's original pace2. SSI's next research release tests whether patience turns Nvidia's compute into results investors can point at4. Discovery Loop's first published work will show whether four founders actually protect a lab from the raids reshaping its rivals6.
Sources
- Reuters, "Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12 billion in early-stage funding," Reuters (via TradingView), July 15, 2025, https://it.tradingview.com/news/reuters.com%2C2025%3Anewsml_L4N3TC1L6%3A0-mira-murati-s-ai-startup-thinking-machines-valued-at-12-billion-in-early-stage-funding
- American Bazaar Staff, "One-third of Thinking Machines Lab founding team exits amid fierce AI hiring battle," American Bazaar, May 14, 2026, https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/05/14/one-third-of-thinking-machines-lab-founding-team-exits-480782/
- American Bazaar Staff, "Weng leaves Thinking Machines to rejoin OpenAI amid health struggles," American Bazaar, July 30, 2026, https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/07/30/weng-leaves-thinking-machines-to-rejoin-openai-485496/
- TechCrunch Staff, "Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research," TechCrunch, July 27, 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-partners-with-nvidia-to-scale-its-ai-research/
- CTech Staff, "Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence raises $2 billion at $32 billion valuation," Calcalist (CTech), April 13, 2025, https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjfywdtajl
- TechCrunch Staff, "Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup," TechCrunch, Aug. 5, 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup/
- TechCrunch Staff, "Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03B to build world models," TechCrunch, March 9, 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/yann-lecuns-ami-labs-raises-1-03-billion-to-build-world-models/
- Bloomberg News, "AI Science Startup Periodic Labs Is in Deal Talks at About $7 Billion Valuation," Bloomberg, March 25, 2026, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-25/ai-science-startup-periodic-labs-is-in-deal-talks-at-about-7-billion-valuation
- Roic Staff, "Reflection AI Seeks Investors at Over $20 Billion Valuation Amid Rapid Growth," Roic, March 2, 2026, https://www.roic.ai/news/reflection-ai-seeks-investors-at-over-20-billion-valuation-amid-rapid-growth-03-02-2026
- Maxwell Zeff, "Ilya Sutskever will lead Safe Superintelligence following his CEO's exit," TechCrunch, July 3, 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-will-lead-safe-superintelligence-following-his-ceos-exit
- Henry Chandonnet, "Ex-OpenAI VP says the AI talent war has made the pay gulf 'wider and wider' — and will lead to 'second-order effects'," Business Insider (via Yahoo Finance), August 27, 2025, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-openai-vp-says-ai-162425971.html