We Speak Entrepreneurs

Mira Murati Walked Away From the Top Job in AI and Raised $2 Billion to Build Her Own Lab

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Mira Murati, founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab. Photo by SWinxy, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Most people who reach the chief technology officer’s chair at OpenAI hold on to it. Mira Murati left it, and within months investors were handing her more seed money than any startup founder had ever raised. That is the size of the bet the technology world has placed on the Albanian born engineer who helped bring ChatGPT into the world.

Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025, a San Francisco research and product company built around a simple idea: AI should be something people can shape themselves, not just rent as a finished product. On July 15, 2025, the lab announced it had closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation, the largest seed financing on record. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD and Jane Street also taking part. The government of Albania, Murati’s home country, put in $10 million of its own.

The founding team she assembled reads like a reunion of the people who built modern AI. Former OpenAI research executive Barret Zoph joined as chief technology officer and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as chief research officer, alongside roughly two dozen researchers drawn from OpenAI and DeepMind. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation.

The lab’s first product, Tinker, launched on October 1, 2025. It is a training service that lets companies and researchers fine tune AI models on their own data without running their own computing infrastructure, keeping control of their data and their process. Speaking about a later partnership with Nvidia, Murati said: “This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn.”

By September 2026, reporting put the young company’s revenue run rate above $100 million. Murati’s story is not a company press release. It is one person who reached the top of the biggest firm in her field, decided the work was not finished, and persuaded the market to fund her vision before she had a single product to show.

We Speak Entrepreneurs

Lucy Guo Left Scale AI in 2018 and Kept Her Shares. At 30 She Became the Youngest Self Made Woman Billionaire While Building Passes

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI and founder and CEO of Passes. Photo by KBDBK, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most valuable decision of Lucy Guo’s career was the one she made on her way out the door. When she left Scale AI in 2018, two years after co-founding it, she kept her stake. In April 2025 Forbes named her the youngest self made woman billionaire in the world, and she earned the title while running a completely different company.

Guo, a self taught coder who dropped out of Carnegie Mellon on a Thiel Fellowship, co-founded Scale AI in 2016 at 21 with Alexandr Wang, who was 19. She ran operations and product design before leaving in 2018, holding on to just under 5% of the company. As Scale’s value climbed, a 2025 tender offer at a $25 billion valuation, followed by Meta’s June 2025 investment at more than $29 billion, that stake carried her net worth to an estimated $1.25 billion at age 30, passing the mark Taylor Swift had set. Forbes counted her among just six self made women billionaires on the planet under 40.

Her working days, though, belong to her second company. Guo founded Passes in 2022, a Los Angeles based platform that lets creators sell subscriptions, chats and content directly to fans in a brand safe setting. Passes has raised about $50 million across three rounds from investors including Bond Capital and Menlo Ventures, at a reported $150 million valuation, and has signed names including gymnast Olivia Dunne and Shaquille O’Neal.

The pairing is the story business students will study. One founder, two companies: the first made her rich because she kept ownership even after she left the building, and the second is the one she is still in the building for, building the creator economy platform she wants to run for the long term.