If you were to imagine the kind of startup likely to snag the largest seed round of all time, it would probably look something like Thinking Machines Lab.
Launched and led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and joined by AI heavy hitters from Meta, OpenAI, Google and Mistral AI, the San Francisco company certainly has a founding team that investors ought to like. And given prevailing valuations for leading AI unicorns, a $2 billion seed deal doesn’t even sound that big in context.
In reality, however, it is a round of unprecedented hugeness. The $2 billion Andreessen Horowitz-led financing that Thinking Machines reportedly just closed at a $10 billion valuation is by far the largest seed round in the Crunchbase dataset.
It’s not even close. The next-largest U.S. seed financings 1 have all been in the $200 million to $450 million range, including:
- Yuga Labs’ raised a $450 million seed financing in 2022. The Miami company is best known for its Bored Ape Yacht Club digital collectibles and NFTs.
- Lila Sciences, a developer of AI-enabled autonomous labs, picked up $200 million in a March seed financing backed by Flagship Pioneering.
- Binance.US, the U.S. franchise of crypto exchange Binance, locked up a seed round of more than $200 million at a $4.5 billion pre-money valuation in a 2022 financing.
- Chestnut Carbon, a developer of U.S. forestry projects offering carbon removal credits, secured $200 million in a 2022 seed round.
- Aptos Labs, a developer of blockchain and Web3 technology, landed $200 million in a March 2022 seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
In addition to its record-setting size, another standout characteristic of the Thinking Machines round is how little surprise it generated. This seems largely due to its status as a brainchild of top OpenAI alums.
After all, if OpenAI managed to secure a recent $300 billion post-money valuation largely driven by the prowess of its team, it’s reasonable to expect great things out of its early leaders in their solo ventures as well.
And clearly Thinking Machines is laying out an ambitious mission. The company, founded last year, says its plans “to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,” and also intends “to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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