Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is in talks for a new funding round. The company plans to raise at least $1 billion at a pre-money valuation of at least $40 billion. Existing investor Accel is negotiating to lead the round, and Nvidia is considering joining. The deal hasn’t closed yet.
That would be a massive jump from the company’s last round. When Thinking Machines raised $2 billion last year, it did so at a $10 billion pre-money valuation — $12 billion after the round. On the same pre-money basis, the new valuation is at least four times where the company stood a little over a year ago. But Thinking Machines was reportedly seeking a valuation above $50 billion late last year, so this is actually a step down from that ask.
The company is also starting to generate meaningful revenue: at least a few hundred million dollars on an annualized basis. Most of that comes from Tinker, where customers pay for compute and tools to fine-tune AI models on their own data. Thinking Machines’ first self-developed open-weight model, Inkling, has also been plugged into Tinker.
Thinking Machines signed a long-term compute deal with Nvidia this year, planning to deploy at least 1 gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia is also adding a fresh investment. The new round will continue to fund model training, server rentals, and hiring.
Source: The Information