With Thinking Machines Lab hitting a $10 billion valuation following its Andreessen Horowitz-backed $2B seed round, a pattern appears to be developing — startups run by former OpenAI employees take off, no matter what.
In the early 2000s, a group of former PayPal employees launched or backed companies that are huge in today’s market; think of names like Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp. This group was referred to as the “PayPal Mafia.” Now, in 2025, a new tech mafia is taking shape in Silicon Valley.
This time, it is former OpenAI employees taking over the artificial intelligence industry. These former employees are now behind some of the most hyped AI startups in the tech world.
Billions raised, no products required
Thinking Machines Lab , an AI startup founded by the former OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati, just raised nearly $2 billion. The company is also currently valued at $10 billion.
The deal was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Accel and Conviction Partners, and is especially remarkable as it doesn’t include a product. Yes, Thinking Machines is yet to launch a single offering. The company has also offered minimal public details about its plans, but has stated that it is focused on building AI that fosters more “human-AI collaboration.”
For this group of alumni, the openAI name appears to be more than convincing enough for investors. OpenAI’s cofounder, John Schulman and the former research VP, Barret Zoph are also on Murati’s team at Thinking Machines Lab.
OpenAI alums dominate the billion-dollar startup club
Thinking Machines Lab is only one of the startups run by former OpenAI employees to experience billion-dollar success. OpenAI alums and siblings, Dario and Daniela Amodei, founded Anthropic together, and the AI firm has secured billions in funding since its launch, with a valuation of $61.5 billion as of March 2025.
Safe Superintelligence (SSI), founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has raised $2 billion despite reports that the company currently lacks a product or clear plans for the future. Its valuation sits at $32 billion.
Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine co-founded by OpenAI’s previous researcher Aravind Srinivas, attracted investments from tech giants like Jeff Bezos and Nvidia. It is currently raising another $1 billion at an $18 billion valuation.
Less mainstream companies like Stem AI, Eureka Labs, Living Carbon, Prosper robotics, Cresta and Covariant are also projects that involve previous OpenAI employees. These companies are attracting funding from top-tier firms including Andreessen Horowitz.
The OpenAI alumni network is currently well-positioned to define artificial intelligence’s direction.
The group’s influence extends into Big Tech as well. In late 2024, Amazon hired multiple founders from the robotics startup, Covariant, which was founded by three OpenAI alums, and brought on much of the company’s team.
Adept AI’s former CEO, David Luan, who now leads Amazon’s AI agents division, belongs to the highly coveted OpenAI alumni club. Meanwhile, Margaret Jennings, who worked at OpenAI in 2022 and 2023 before leaving to co-found Kindo, is now the head of product and research at the French AI startup, Mistral. Kindo raised over $27 million in funding while Kindo was at the helm.
Even Elon Musk’s xAI , a company now valued at $113 billion after it acquired X, was co-founded in part by Kyle Kosic, who previously worked on OpenAI infrastructure.
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