- Thinking Machines is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, led by Accel.
- It’s a comedown from the $50 billion valuation talks that collapsed in January.
- Annualised revenue tops $100 million, implying a valuation multiple above 400 times.
Thinking Machines is negotiating a new funding round: $1 billion at a valuation of at least $40 billion, with existing investor Accel in talks to lead, The Information reported on September 3. Nvidia, an investor in the company’s seed round, has also discussed joining this one, according to the report.
It’s the third valuation the AI lab has floated in just over a year, and a third less than what it was chasing ten months ago.
A second attempt at scale
Thinking Machines closed the largest seed round in AI history in July 2025: $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction Partners joining. Tech Funding News reported at the time that investors were largely paying for the pedigree of Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, and the roughly two dozen OpenAI veterans who followed her.
By November, appetite for that pedigree had grown bolder still. TFN covered the talks then underway for a $50 billion to $60 billion valuation, a four- to five-fold jump in four months, on the strength of one shipped product, Tinker.
Those talks never closed. In January, co-founder and chief technology officer Barret Zoph left the company mid-all-hands. Less than an hour later, OpenAI announced his return, along with fellow Thinking Machines co-founder Luke Metz and researcher Sam Schoenholz. The valuation talks fell apart in the fallout, and the company’s private mark reset to its $12 billion seed price. Lilian Weng, another founding researcher, left for OpenAI in July.
Eight months on, Thinking Machines is trying again: at $40 billion instead of $50 billion, and with Accel, rather than a new entrant, doing the courting.
The revenue gap hasn’t closed
What’s changed since January is a product, not a balance sheet. In July, the company shipped Inkling, an open-weight model that earns revenue through the usage-based compute fees customers pay to adapt it to their own data on Tinker.
Annualised revenue now tops $100 million, according to a source with knowledge of the company’s finances, a valuation multiple above 400 times revenue, with little recent precedent even in this AI cycle.
Accel’s willingness to lead the round suggests its conviction hasn’t dimmed much since the seed round. The firm has committed roughly $8.5 billion across new funds this year, and Thinking Machines remains one of its highest-profile AI deals.
Compute, not just capital
Nvidia’s potential involvement points to where some of the fresh capital would go. The chipmaker struck a multiyear partnership with Thinking Machines in March, committing at least one gigawatt of its upcoming Vera Rubin systems and making an undisclosed investment of its own.
That compute relationship is arguably now as central to Thinking Machines’ pitch as its research pedigree. Giving away model weights while charging for the infrastructure underneath them is a strategy that depends on having a lot of that infrastructure.
Whether $40 billion is a price investors will pay twice, after watching the first attempt collapse under a leadership exodus, is the question this round still has to answer.
