Thinking Machines is negotiating a $1 billion funding round at a valuation above $40 billion, with e...

Thinking Machines is negotiating a $1 billion funding round at a valuation above $40 billion, with existing investor Accel reportedly positioned to lead.

Mira Murati's AI research lab, founded in early 2025 by the former OpenAI CTO, is in talks to raise the round at a valuation that would still fall short of the $50 billion mark the company was reportedly targeting by the end of 2025, according to a report cited by TechCrunch. People familiar with its finances say annual revenue has surpassed $100 million, implying a steep valuation-to-revenue multiple. The company's prior round, a $2 billion raise led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction Partners participating, valued it at $12 billion. Thinking Machines monetizes through Tinker, a platform where customers pay for compute to fine-tune models on their own data, and released the open-weight model Inkling in July.

A jump from $12 billion to $40-billion-plus in roughly a year, on revenue still in the low hundreds of millions, shows investors continuing to price frontier-adjacent labs on team pedigree and platform potential rather than current revenue, even as the company has lost co-founders Lilian Weng and Luke Metz, who both returned to OpenAI. Per the AI Market Watch index, coverage volume on the company roughly doubled in the last 90 days versus the prior 90 (name-matched, pipeline coverage, not a census), tracking last month's Inkling launch feeding into this valuation talk.

For investors, the deal extends a pattern of mega-valuations attaching to labs built on ex-OpenAI research talent ahead of proven monetization at scale. For enterprises evaluating Tinker as a fine-tuning vendor, the raise signals runway stability but does not yet answer whether usage-based compute revenue can grow into the multiple being paid.

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