Thinking Machines Lab has secured 22,000 square feet of office space at 79 Fifth Avenue in New York City, according to Commercial Observer. The lease establishes a major East Coast footprint for the young enterprise as it scales its operations following a massive fundraising cycle and the release of its first open-weights model.
A Flatiron Footprint for Murati’s Enterprise
The newly secured Manhattan office spans 22,000 square feet in the Flatiron District commercial corridor, providing the research and development firm with dedicated workspace outside of its West Coast origins. According to Commercial Observer, the transaction places the artificial intelligence startup in a prominent Midtown South building known for housing tech tenants and corporate offices. The real estate move supports the company’s broader expansion strategy following its initial formation in San Francisco as a public benefit corporation in February 2025.
Rapid Growth and Heavyweight Backing
Thinking Machines Lab has scaled rapidly since its launch under the leadership of Murati, who departed OpenAI in September 2024 after serving six and a half years as CTO, as reported by Metirai.
The startup drew widespread industry attention in July 2025 by closing a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street, alongside a $10 million investment from the government of Albania, according to Metirai’s reporting.
Technical Milestones and Infrastructure
Beyond its physical expansion in New York, the startup has pushed forward with technical milestones. In October 2025, the company launched Tinker, an application programming interface designed for fine-tuning open language models, targeting model customization as a primary revenue engine.
Later, in March 2026, Thinking Machines Lab announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia to deploy approximately a gigawatt of computing capacity, according to Metirai. That infrastructure powered the training of Inkling, an open-weights foundation model released by the lab in July 2026.
Building Out the Roster in Manhattan
The company’s founding team includes prominent industry researchers and former OpenAI executives such as John Schulman, Lilian Weng, Barret Zoph, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz, alongside talent drawn from Meta and Mistral, as documented by Metirai.
While that pedigree has accelerated early development, the enterprise has also managed executive turnover, including departures back to OpenAI and moves to competing labs in early 2026. The new New York office positions Thinking Machines Lab to recruit technical talent from East Coast academic institutions and engineering hubs as it continues developing its model ecosystem.
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