Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Nears a $40 Billion Value

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, is in talks to raise at least $1 billion at a valuation of $40 billion or more. Existing backer Accel is expected to lead the round, according to reporting from TechCrunch and Bloomberg, and Nvidia has discussed putting in as much as $2.5 billion of its own.

The figure is startling for a company barely a year and a half old. Thinking Machines was founded in early 2025 after Murati left OpenAI, and it reached a $12 billion valuation last summer on a $2 billion seed round, one of the largest in venture history. A $40 billion mark would more than triple that in about a year, without the company having shipped a blockbuster consumer product.

What the company actually sells

Thinking Machines makes its money by helping businesses customize AI models on their own data, and it releases some open-weight models for free. Reports put its annualized revenue in the low hundreds of millions, which is real but modest against a $40 billion price tag. Investors are paying for the team and the thesis rather than the current income statement.

That thesis centers on adaptable systems companies can shape to their own needs instead of renting a single fixed model. It is a bet that the next phase of AI is less about one all-powerful model and more about tuning capable models to specific work. Murati's reputation from her years running research and product at OpenAI is doing a lot of the lifting in these conversations.

The mega-round machine keeps running

The raise fits a pattern that has defined 2026. A small cluster of frontier labs and infrastructure firms keeps absorbing enormous checks, often before revenue catches up. In just the past two weeks the coding startup Cognition closed in on a $47 billion valuation, and Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for about $13 billion. Nvidia's interest in Thinking Machines is part of the same strategy, seeding the companies that will go on to buy its chips.

Whether valuations like these hold up is the question hanging over the whole sector. For now the money keeps flowing to a handful of names, and Murati's is near the top of the list.