Former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati has secured about $2 billion for her seven-month-old startup, Thinking Machines Lab, in a seed round that values the artificial-intelligence company at roughly $12 billion, the company said on Tuesday. Andreessen Horowitz led the financing, joined by Nvidia, AMD, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco and Jane Street. The deal is among the largest early-stage rounds on record and gives Murati board voting power that outweighs those of other directors, according to people familiar with the terms. Thinking Machines’ team is already populated with several high-profile alumni of OpenAI, including researcher John Schulman. Murati said the San Francisco-based firm is building multimodal, “collaborative” AI systems and will reveal its first product in the coming months. The launch will feature a significant open-source element designed to help researchers and companies customise their own models, part of the startup’s goal to make advanced AI “safer, more reliable and broadly accessible.”