Thinking Machines Lab nears $5B round at $40B valuation, led by Accel
What's the deal? Thinking Machines Lab, the San Francisco AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, is reportedly raising $5 billion at a $40 billion pre-money valuation. Accel is leading the round, which could close within days. If it does, the company will have raised about $7 billion in disclosed funding.
Why now? The raise more than triples the $12 billion valuation from the company's $2 billion seed in July 2025. It also comes after an earlier attempt to raise at a $50 billion valuation was abandoned, following the departure of several co-founders — including Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Andrew Tulloch — to rivals such as Meta and OpenAI.
What's the endgame? The company sells Tinker, a system that lets organisations fine-tune large language models on their own data, taking usage fees on the computing. It also builds its own models: its first open-weight model, Inkling, launched in July, and a new version followed in November. A new version of Tinker released last week brought gains in AI coding.
What could go wrong? Revenue remains modest against the price. A source told TechCrunch in September that annual revenue exceeded $100 million — implying a multiple of up to 400x. For comparison, OpenAI's $1.25 trillion valuation sits at roughly 25x its run rate.
Accel backed the seed round alongside a16z, Nvidia, AMD, ServiceNow, Cisco, and Jane Street. Nvidia looms large: in September it was reported to potentially supply about half of a $5–6 billion round, and in March the two announced a multi-year deal to deploy at least one gigawatt of Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems from early 2027. With that partnership in place, the funds will likely go toward computing power, though the company has not disclosed their use.
The comparison to Europe is stark: Mistral's €3 billion round in September, the largest equity raise ever by a European tech company, valued it at over €21 billion. The open question is whether product adoption and revenue can justify the price.
Read more: Tech Funding News, Business Insider
Image credit: TechCrunch
