Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, is set to close a $5 billion funding round at a $40 billion pre-money valuation. Accel is leading the round, according to multiple sources cited by Business Insider.
The deal, which could close as soon as this week, would more than triple the company's valuation from its last public round. It signals that investors remain willing to place enormous bets on frontier AI labs even as competition for talent and capital intensifies across the industry.
Thinking Machines Lab funding round details
Business Insider reported that the new round values Thinking Machines Lab at $40 billion before the investment, up from more than $10 billion previously. The company raised a $2 billion seed round last year before launching a product.
The sources, who were not named, said Accel is leading the financing. A representative for Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment, and Accel did not respond to a request for comment.
The reporting also notes that last year the company sought a new round at a $50 billion valuation, but those talks were abandoned. In September, The Information reported that Thinking Machines Lab was in talks to raise fresh funding.
What Thinking Machines Lab builds
Thinking Machines Lab emerged from stealth last year as one of the highest-profile AI labs, thanks to its leadership's deep ties to OpenAI. Murati served as OpenAI's CTO, and other key figures helped train early versions of ChatGPT.
The company's first tool, Tinker, is a system that makes it easier to fine-tune large language models. On Thursday, Thinking Machines released a new version of Tinker and said the model has improved at AI coding tasks.
The lab also debuted Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active parameters. According to Thinking Machines, the weights are planned for release next week after safety testing. The company says its mission is to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable, with an emphasis on human-AI collaboration and multimodal capabilities.
