OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab, and the built-in chaos of a $2B seed round

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, just raised one of the largest seed rounds in history. Murati secured $2 billion in that seed round for Thinking Machines Lab — a startup so early, it hasn’t even revealed what it’s working on yet. The move is raising eyebrows across Silicon Valley, and it’s only the latest in a wave of top researchers splintering off from OpenAI to chase their own AI moonshots. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan and Anthony Ha break down what’s fueling the OpenAI talent shuffle, investor enthusiasm, and a former employee’s behind-the-scenes peek inside the company. Either way, the team agrees: seed rounds really have changed. Listen to the full episode to hear more news from the week, including: The drama around xAI's safety practices keeps coming, with researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic publicly criticizing Musk's AI startup over Grok's latest scandals and what they reveal about broader AI safety gaps Uber investing hundreds of millions into premium robotaxis with Lucid and Nuro. Kirsten and Rebecca have some thoughts on whether this is a smart move or more AV déjà vu The AI coding assistant sector is heating up with major acquisitions. Devin-maker Cognition acquired Windsurf just days after Google poached the latter’s leadership in what's becoming a pattern of reverse acquihires Jack Dorsey's latest string of vibe-coding projects and nonprofit hacker collective, all pointing back to his long-standing push for decentralized tech. Equity will be back for you next week, so don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:22.5	spending within the hour. Over 30,000 companies, including one in three U.S. startups, use Brex.
0:28.3	Join them at brex.com, backslash, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:49.9	Today is Friday, July 18th. I'm Kirsten Koresak Transportation Editor at TechCrunch, and I'm joined
0:56.0	today by our weekend editor, Anthony Haugh, and senior reporter Rebecca Boulon, who listeners know
1:02.4	from our interview show, Max is on the road today, but he did recently catch up with Hugging Faces
1:08.2	co-founder and chief scientist Thomas Wolfe. So please check
1:12.1	out that episode, which was just released. Anthony, what are we talking about today?
1:18.4	I'm glad you asked. On the show today, we're going to have deals of the week from Cognition
1:22.0	slash windsurf and Uber's big robo taxi play. And then we're going to be talking about the AI
1:27.3	talent shuffle and what the heck Jack Dorsey's been up to.
1:31.1	First, just a little check-in.
1:33.8	Have you guys been following?
1:35.1	I know last week we talked about some drama around X-A-I.
1:38.5	That drama has not ended.
1:41.1	There's been criticism.
1:42.9	There have been these new sort of avatars from
1:45.9	XAI. What have you all made of it? So I want to preface this whole conversation that it's like,
	...

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