Executive Spotlight: Mira Murati, Founder and CEO, Thinking Machines Lab

Current role and company

Murati leads Thinking Machines Lab as CEO. The queue listing for this page agrees, and two fetched sources confirm it. Her title is worded two ways: Fortune says "Founder and CEO," while the company's own March 2026 post says cofounder and CEO.

• Fortune (2025 ranking page)Lists her as Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, ranked 47 on its Most Powerful Women list.
• Company post (March 10, 2026)Identifies her as cofounder and CEO in the NVIDIA partnership announcement.
• Company descriptionAn artificial intelligence research and product company aiming for AI that is more widely understood, customizable and generally capable.

The company's site lists Inkling, Inkling-Small, Interaction and Tinker. It has no team page, so leadership details come from news reports.

Career path

• Education and early work. Fortune reports a B.A. in mathematics from Colby College, a B.Eng. in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth's Thayer School, a 2011 summer analyst job at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo and a role as an advanced concepts engineer at Zodiac Aerospace through 2013.
• Tesla, 2013. Joined as a senior product manager on the Model X program, per Fortune.
• Leap Motion, 2016. Vice president of product and engineering at the augmented-reality startup for about two years.
• OpenAI, 2018 to 2024. Joined in June 2018 as VP of applied AI and partnerships, became senior vice president of research, product and partnerships in 2020 and chief technology officer in 2022, overseeing ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex and Sora.
• November 2023. Served as OpenAI's interim CEO for about three days, per Fortune.
• September 2024. Announced her departure from OpenAI.
• Thinking Machines Lab, 2025. TechCrunch says the company came out of stealth on February 18, 2025, with Murati as CEO.

What she is known for

• Leading ChatGPT-era product work. Fortune says she led development of ChatGPT while OpenAI's CTO.
• A record seed round. TechCrunch reported on July 15, 2025 that the company closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
• Tinker. The company's first product, announced October 1, 2025 and described by Fortune as letting users fine-tune open models such as Llama and Qwen with a few lines of code.
• Inkling. On July 15, 2026 the company released Inkling, an open-weights model, with full weights on Hugging Face.
• Handling co-founder departures. TechCrunch reported on January 14, 2026 that Murati said the company had parted ways with co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph, and named Soumith Chintala CTO. Zoph, co-founder Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz rejoined OpenAI, and co-founder Andrew Tulloch had left for Meta in October 2025.

Leadership style and philosophy

These points come from Murati's own statements as quoted by Fortune and the company.

• AI as an extension of people. Fortune quotes her: "We believe AI should serve as an extension of individual agency."
• Collaboration. TechCrunch says the company plans multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively and treats AI safety as a core tenet.
• Compute as foundation. In the March 2026 NVIDIA announcement she said the partnership "accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own."
• Candor about limits. The Inkling post says it is "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed," and pitches strengths in multimodality and fine-tuning.

Key numbers (Thinking Machines Lab, as reported)

Thinking Machines is private. Funding figures come from TechCrunch; model and product figures are company-reported on its own site.

• Seed round (July 2025)$2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
• Compute (March 2026, company-reported)Plans to deploy at least one gigawatt of NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems, targeted for early next year; NVIDIA also made an investment of undisclosed size.
• Inkling (July 2026, company-reported)975 billion total and 41 billion active parameters, up to 1 million tokens of context, pretrained on 45 trillion tokens.
• Tinker (October 2025 to October 2026, company-reported)Launched with 14 text-only models and has added over 20 more, from 4 billion to 1 trillion parameters.
• Team size (February 2025)TechCrunch says the company blog listed 29 employees.

What to watch next

Worth tracking: how Thinking Machines follows Inkling with further models, how the NVIDIA compute build-out proceeds, and how the leadership team settles after the 2026 departures.

Questions people ask

Sources

• Fortune: Mira Murati, Most Powerful Women 2025 · Title, OpenAI and departure
• Fortune: Mira Murati career profile (October 2025) · Career timeline and her quote
• TechCrunch: Thinking Machines Lab launch (February 18, 2025) · CEO title, mission, early team
• TechCrunch: $12B seed round (July 15, 2025) · Funding and valuation
• TechCrunch: co-founders leave for OpenAI (January 14, 2026) · Departures and new CTO
• Thinking Machines Lab: home page · Company description and products
• Thinking Machines Lab: NVIDIA partnership (March 10, 2026) · Her title and compute plan
• Thinking Machines Lab: Inkling (July 15, 2026) · Model figures
• Thinking Machines Lab: One Year of Tinker (October 15, 2026) · Tinker model counts
• Speakers Associates: Mira Murati speaker profile · Hero photo

Facts were read from the linked pages on October 31, 2026. Pages were read through a fetch tool that returns summaries, so confirm details on the original page. The hero photo is the speaker headshot from her Speakers Associates profile, placed on a blurred card. This page covers public professional information only.

Top photo: Mira Murati via Speakers Associates (speakersassociates.com/speaker/mira-murati)