Thinking Machines, the AI lab founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is in talks to raise $1 billion at a valuation of at least $40 billion, according to a report by The Information. Existing backer Accel is in talks to lead the fundraise.
If the new round is completed, it would value the company below the $50 billion valuation that Thinking Machines reportedly sought to secure late last year. Thinking Machines’ annual revenue run rate stands at more than $100 million, according to a source with knowledge of the company’s financials. A TechCrunch report also cited a source with knowledge of the company’s financials. At that revenue figure, a $40 billion valuation would reflect an extraordinarily high revenue multiple.
Thinking Machines announced Inklings in July, an open-weight model that generates revenue by charging usage-based compute fees for adapting models on proprietary data through its Tinker platform.
READ: Lilian Weng leaves Thinking Machines to rejoin OpenAI amid health struggles (July 30, 2026)
Previously, Thinking Machines had raised $2 billion in one of the biggest seed funding rounds in history. Andreessen Horowitz led the investment, joined by Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed and Conviction Partners.
Thinking Machines originally attracted several of Murati’s former co-workers at OpenAI, including John Schulman, Barret Zoph and Luke Metz. Murati left OpenAI in 2024 after working there for six years. After being promoted to the executive role of CTO in 2022, she led the company’s work on ChatGPT, the text-to-image AI DALL-E and the code-generating system Codex, which powered early versions of GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant. She also briefly served as interim CEO when Sam Altman was removed from the position by board members in 2024.
READ: One-third of Thinking Machines Lab founding team exits amid fierce AI hiring battle (May 14, 2026)
Since then, several members of the founding team have left the company, including four of its six co-founders. Most recently, researcher and co-founder Lilian Weng stepped down from her position due to severe health issues. Just days after announcing her departure, reports confirmed that she was returning to OpenAI, her former employer, to lead an internal research team focused on recursive self-improvement. In a message shared with colleagues, Weng disclosed that the relentless pace of building a new company had pushed her body to its absolute limits.
Fellow co-founders Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Andrew Tullock had previously departed the company, with Zoph and Metz notably returning to OpenAI earlier this year. Only Murati and Chief Scientist John Schulman remain from the original founding team.