Thinking Machines Lab seeks $40B valuation amid funding talks

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is in discussions to raise capital at a valuation of roughly $40 billion. If the round closes at that number, it would represent a more than threefold jump from the $12 billion post-money valuation the company secured during its seed round in July 2025.

From $12B to $50B to $40B: the valuation rollercoaster

Thinking Machines Lab burst onto the scene in February 2025 when Murati, fresh off her departure from OpenAI, assembled a team of former colleagues to build what she envisioned as a public benefit corporation focused on scalable AI models and developer tools.

The company wasted little time raising capital. Its $2 billion seed round, which closed in July 2025, ranked among the largest seed financings on record. Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and AMD all participated, alongside an eclectic group that included a small investment from the Albanian government (Murati is of Albanian descent).

By late 2025, the company was reportedly exploring a follow-on raise at valuations as high as $50 billion. Those talks collapsed by early 2026, pushing the company back to its post-seed valuation of $12 billion.

What the company has actually built

The first product was Tinker, an API designed for fine-tuning open-weight models, which launched in October 2025. The second release was Inkling, launched on July 15, 2026. Inkling is a multimodal foundation model packing 975 billion parameters.

Thinking Machines Lab locked down a multi-year partnership with Nvidia in March 2026 that provides access to at least one gigawatt of cutting-edge compute capacity, along with an undisclosed additional investment. A separate infrastructure deal with Google Cloud rounds out the company’s hardware and cloud strategy.

One gigawatt of compute is a staggering amount of power. To put it in perspective, a single large data center typically consumes between 50 and 100 megawatts. The Nvidia deal effectively guarantees Thinking Machines Lab the resources to train and serve models at a scale that only a handful of companies in the world can match.

The competitive landscape is brutal

The company employs between 100 and 200 people as of mid-2026. That’s lean by the standards of its competitors, some of which have thousands of employees.

The public benefit corporation structure signals an intention to balance profit with broader societal considerations.

If the $40 billion round materializes, it would place Thinking Machines Lab among the most valuable private AI companies in the world. The fact that valuation talks previously reached $50 billion and then fell apart suggests that investors are being more disciplined this time around.

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