If you were to imagine the kind of startup likely to snag the largest seed round of all time, it would probably look something like .
Launched and led by former CTO , and joined by AI heavy hitters from , OpenAI, and , the San Francisco company certainly has a founding team that investors ought to like. And given prevailing valuations for聽 leading AI unicorns, a $2 billion seed deal doesn鈥檛 even sound that big in context.
In reality, however, it is a round of unprecedented hugeness. The -led financing that Thinking Machines reportedly at a $10 billion valuation is by far the largest seed round in the 小蓝视频色情网页版 dataset.
It鈥檚 not even close. The next-largest U.S. seed financings 1 have all been in the $200 million to $450 million range, including:
- 鈥 raised a $450 million seed financing in 2022. The Miami company is best known for its digital collectibles and NFTs.
- , a developer of AI-enabled autonomous labs, picked up $200 million in a March seed financing backed by .
- , the U.S. franchise of crypto exchange , locked up a seed round of more than $200 million at a $4.5 billion pre-money valuation in a 2022 financing.
- , a developer of U.S. forestry projects offering carbon removal credits, secured $200 million in a 2022 seed round.
- , a developer of blockchain and Web3 technology, landed $200 million in a March 2022 seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
In addition to its record-setting size, another standout characteristic of the Thinking Machines round is how little surprise it generated. This seems largely due to its status as a brainchild of top OpenAI alums.
After all, if OpenAI managed to secure a recent $300 billion post-money valuation largely driven by the prowess of its team, it鈥檚 reasonable to expect great things out of its early leaders in their solo ventures as well.
And clearly Thinking Machines is laying out an ambitious mission. The company, founded last year, says its plans 鈥渢o make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable,鈥 and also intends 鈥渢o build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively.鈥
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Illustration:
Not all companies have a first reported funding round classified as a seed financing. In some cases, a first reported round may be a Series A, for example. Other recently-founded, heavily funded companies, including , never raised a reported seed round, per 小蓝视频色情网页版 data.↩
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