Former OpenAI Product Manager Launches Startup Backed by Mira Murati

The OpenAI mafia is expanding.

Angela Jiang, an early OpenAI product manager, has launched a new AI startup, Worktrace AI, backed by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Like Murati’s secretive startup, Thinking Machines Lab, Worktrace AI focuses on selling AI to large businesses.

Worktrace AI was in talks this summer to raise a seed round of $10 million at a $50 million valuation, according to correspondence seen by Business Insider.

Worktrace AI has a website and LinkedIn page, but it has not made any public announcements about its launch. Jiang declined to comment. Her cofounder, Deepak Vasisht, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, did not respond to a request for comment.

Worktrace AI helps businesses find and automate repetitive tasks by observing employees, its website said. It’s part of a recent interest in Silicon Valley in AI learning and replicating human tasks. Last month, for example, OpenAI announced new methods to measure the performance of its models on real-world tasks, such as writing legal briefs.

Worktrace AI has attracted funding from a who’s who of OpenAI figures. Its backers include Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT; Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer; and Joanne Jang, who led the team responsible for shaping ChatGPT’s behavior, according to a job posting for a founding engineer.

Worktrace AI is also funded by OpenAI’s startup fund, along with venture capital firms 8VC and Conviction, among others, the job listing said.

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Jiang was OpenAI’s third product manager and helped launch the models behind ChatGPT, including the version that went viral in late 2022. She later worked on OpenAI’s public policy team before leaving the company in December 2024, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Worktrace AI is the latest in a wave of highly valued AI startups founded by former OpenAI employees, many of which have secured major funding before launching a product or generating revenue.

Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab closed a mega $2 billion seed funding round this year, Business Insider previously reported, and it’s now valued at $12 billion. Safe Superintelligence, founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, is valued at $32 billion, the Financial Times reported.

Last month, Periodic Labs, co-founded by William Fedus, one of the researchers who helped create ChatGPT, raised a $300 million round to build “AI scientists,” the company announced.

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