Thinking Machines, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is reportedly negotiating a $1 billion funding round, with Accel potentially leading the investment at a valuation of at least $40 billion.
Thinking Machines, the artificial intelligence lab established last year by Mira Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, is reportedly in discussions to raise $1 billion in funding. This new round could value the company at a minimum of $40 billion, as indicated by a report from The Information.
Accel, an existing investor in Thinking Machines, is in talks to lead this funding round. If successful, the valuation would fall short of the $50 billion target that the company aimed for late last year. Currently, Thinking Machines boasts an annual revenue run rate exceeding $100 million, according to sources familiar with the company’s financials. This revenue figure suggests that a $40 billion valuation would represent an exceptionally high revenue multiple.
In July, Thinking Machines launched Inklings, an open-weight model that generates revenue by charging usage-based compute fees for adapting models on proprietary data via its Tinker platform.
Previously, the company raised $2 billion in one of the largest seed funding rounds in history, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the investment alongside notable firms such as Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction Partners.
Mira Murati attracted several former colleagues from OpenAI to join her at Thinking Machines, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph, and Luke Metz. Murati departed from OpenAI in 2024 after a six-year tenure, during which she was promoted to CTO in 2022. In this role, she oversaw significant projects, including ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E, and Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant. She also briefly served as interim CEO following the removal of Sam Altman from the position by board members in 2024.
However, the company has faced challenges, as several founding team members have left. Most recently, co-founder Lilian Weng stepped down due to severe health issues. Shortly after her departure, it was confirmed that she would return to OpenAI to lead an internal research team focused on recursive self-improvement. In a message to her colleagues, Weng expressed that the intense pace of building a new company had taken a significant toll on her health.
Other co-founders, including Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Andrew Tullock, have also departed from the company, with Zoph and Metz returning to OpenAI earlier this year. Currently, only Murati and Chief Scientist John Schulman remain from the original founding team.
This ongoing evolution within Thinking Machines highlights the competitive and rapidly changing landscape of the AI industry, where talent retention and company culture are becoming increasingly critical to success.
For more details, refer to The Information.