Investors’ appetite to back companies created by breakaway former employees of top AI labs is insatiable. Last July, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, raised $2 billion—a record for a seed round—for her new company, Thinking Machines Lab, valuing it at $12 billion despite not having released any product. In 2026’s crop of AI unicorns, Redwood City-based Humans&, built by a team of former Anthropic and xAI talent (among others), was valued at $4.48 billion just four months after its founding.
