Thinking Machines Lab Is Raising $5 Billion at a $40 Billion Pre-Money Valuation, Business Insider Reports

Thinking Machines Lab is close to finalizing a $5 billion funding round at a $40 billion pre-money valuation, with Accel leading, according to Business Insider, which cited multiple people familiar with the matter. The deal could close as soon as this week.

A Thinking Machines representative declined to comment. Accel did not respond to a request for comment. Neither has confirmed the terms.

The numbers

The arithmetic is simple. A $40 billion pre-money valuation plus $5 billion in new cash implies roughly $45 billion after the money goes in.

The lab's last priced round was a $2 billion seed in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $12 billion valuation. Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, Accel and Jane Street also took part. The new figure is more than three times that.

It is also below where the company wanted to be. Bloomberg reported late last year that early talks centered on about $50 billion, with some sources floating $55 billion or $60 billion. Those talks fell apart.

In September, TechCrunch, citing The Information, reported the lab was in talks to raise $1 billion at a valuation of at least $40 billion, with Accel, an existing backer, in talks to lead. The round now described is five times that size.

What the money is buying

The company, founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has two products. Tinker is a fine-tuning service that lets researchers and companies customize open models with their own training loops while Thinking Machines runs the infrastructure. It launched Oct. 1, 2025, and became generally available Dec. 12, 2025.

The second is Inkling, an open-weights model released July 15, 2026. It has 975 billion total parameters and 41 billion active, using a mixture-of-experts design.

On Thursday, the lab released a new version of Tinker and a second-generation model, Inkling 2 Small. The company says it scores significantly higher on analytical intelligence than earlier models, with gains in coding, vision, knowledge work and reasoning. It has 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active. The company said the weights will be released under the Apache 2.0 license next week.

The lab has also announced a partnership with Nvidia to deploy at least one gigawatt of Vera Rubin systems. "This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own," Murati said.

Revenue and the price tag

A source with knowledge of the company's financials told TechCrunch in September that annual revenue run rate is above $100 million. That figure is unconfirmed by the company. TechCrunch called the implied valuation an "extraordinarily high revenue multiple."

Put a $40 billion valuation next to a run rate of just over $100 million and the gap is enormous. Run rate is a snapshot of current pace, not audited annual revenue.

The company, for its part, is selling a thesis: that businesses want AI they can shape themselves rather than rent as a finished product. Investors backing the round are wagering that fine-tuning infrastructure stays central as frontier models multiply.

The talent drain

Business Insider reported in May that about a third of Thinking Machines' founding team had left. Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Andrew Tulloch went to rival companies. Business Insider tied the departures to a mix of factors, including huge pay packages offered by rival AI labs like Meta and OpenAI.

TechCrunch reported that the seed round was backed largely on the pedigree of Murati and the former OpenAI researchers who joined her. Losing a third of that group is a direct hit to the thing investors originally paid for.

The company has made hires too. Competitive coder Neal Wu is among the people who joined.

Who is on the hook

This is venture money, not taxpayer money. If the bet fails, the losses land on Accel and its fellow investors and their own backers.

That is how it should work. Investors who think this valuation is a bargain are free to prove it. Investors who think it is froth are free to stay out.

The round has not been announced by the company, and the final size, valuation and investor list could differ from what Business Insider's sources describe. The open-weights release of Inkling 2 Small, expected next week, will give outside developers their first chance to test the lab's latest claims on performance.