Reports indicate that Thinking Machines, the artificial intelligence laboratory helmed by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, is in discussions with investors for a new funding round that could value the company at approximately $40 billion.
Sources familiar with the matter have revealed that existing backer Accel has held talks to lead the financing round, while NVIDIA, which already holds a stake in the company, is also discussing an additional investment. As of now, Accel, NVIDIA, and Thinking Machines have not responded to requests for comment.
Looking back to July 2025, Thinking Machines successfully completed a $2 billion funding round at a $10 billion valuation. That round was spearheaded by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from NVIDIA, AMD, ServiceNow, Cisco, and several other corporate investors.
In March of this year, NVIDIA and Thinking Machines inked a multi-year partnership agreement, under which the former committed to a "significant" investment in the AI startup and promised to supply it with chips.
This past July, Thinking Machines unveiled Inkling, its first proprietary AI model. The model operates under an open-weight framework, allowing developers and enterprises to freely download and customize it to suit their specific requirements. Inkling boasts a total of 975 billion training parameters, including 41 billion active parameters. Its context window supports up to 1 million tokens, and it was pre-trained on a dataset comprising 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio, and video. This model marks the debut of Thinking Machines' multi-size model family, which also includes a lightweight variant known as Inkling-Small.
Recent months have seen notable changes within Thinking Machines' leadership. In July, co-founder Lilian Weng reportedly departed the company to rejoin OpenAI, where she previously served as Vice President of Safety Research. Another co-founder, Barrett Zoph, has taken a position at Google, while Andrew Tulloch is now an AI researcher at Meta Platforms. Additionally, Luke Metz is said to have left the company, although his LinkedIn profile has not yet been updated to reflect the change.