Thinking Machines Lab Reportedly Nears $5 Billion Round at $40 Billion Valuation
Photo: Hippopx (public domain). Illustrative image.
What happened. Thinking Machines Lab, the artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, is set to close a $5 billion funding round at a $40 billion pre-money valuation as soon as this week, Business Insider reported on 6 November 2026, citing multiple people familiar with the matter. Accel is leading the round, according to the report. Neither company has confirmed the deal: a representative for Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment, and Accel did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. The terms are therefore one outlet’s account of a round that has not closed.
The valuation story. If the round closes at the reported terms, it would more than triple the $12 billion valuation set by the lab’s $2 billion seed round in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, AMD, ServiceNow, Cisco and Jane Street participating. It would also be a step down from the lab’s earlier ambitions: talks late last year at a $50 billion valuation were abandoned, after three co-founders — Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Andrew Tulloch — left for rivals including Meta and OpenAI. The company would have raised about $7 billion in disclosed funding, excluding an undisclosed Nvidia investment in March.
The revenue question. The price is steep against what the company earns. A source told TechCrunch in September that annual revenue exceeded $100 million, which would imply a valuation multiple of up to 400 times revenue at $40 billion. The lab’s first product is Tinker, a system that lets organisations fine-tune large language models on their own data, taking usage fees on the computing involved. Nvidia looms large in the background: The Information reported in September that the chipmaker was in talks to invest about $2.5 billion in the round, and in March the two companies announced a multiyear arrangement under which the lab will deploy at least one gigawatt of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems, with the first rollout targeted for early 2027.
The product context. The funding report landed the day after the lab launched Inkling 2 Small, its second-generation model, on 5 November. The 594-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, with 17 billion active parameters per token, is hosted on Tinker, and the lab says it intends to release the full weights under an Apache 2.0 licence the week after launch, once external safety testing is complete. Inkling 2 Small scored 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Its predecessor, Inkling-Small, shipped in July: a 276-billion-parameter model that scored 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified.
Sources
- Dealroom — “Thinking Machines Lab nears $5B round at $40B valuation, led by Accel” (6 November 2026): https://dealroom.co/news/170334-thinking-machines-lab-nears-5b-round-at-40b-valuation-led-by-accel/
- Tech Funding News — “Report: Accel is to lead a $5B round for Thinking Machines Lab at $40B valuation” (6 November 2026): https://techfundingnews.com/accel-thinking-machines-lab-5b-round-40b-valuation/
- Let’s Data Science — “Thinking Machines Lab reportedly nears $5 billion round at $40 billion valuation” (6 November 2026): https://letsdatascience.com/news/thinking-machines-lab-reportedly-nears-5-billion-round-at-40-fcc2bde1
