Accel reportedly in talks to lead $1B round for Thinking Machines at $40B valuation
TechCrunch Marina Temkin
Rumor — unconfirmed reporting.
Accel is reportedly trying to lead a $1B round for Thinking Machines at a $40B valuation. That’s a huge jump for a lab with over $100M in annual revenue run rate.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Marina Temkin — read the original for the full story.
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Thinking Machines, the AI lab Mira Murati founded early last year after leaving OpenAI, is reportedly chasing a $1 billion round at a valuation of at least $40 billion. The Information reported the talks Thursday, and said existing backer Accel is in line to lead the deal. Accel and Thinking Machines did not immediately comment.
If it closes, the round would come in below the $50 billion valuation the company was reportedly aiming for late last year. Even so, $40 billion is a staggering number for a startup that, by one source’s account, has an annual revenue run rate above $100 million. That puts the company at a very rich multiple, even by AI standards.
The business itself is starting to look less like a pure research story and more like a platform play. In July, Thinking Machines introduced Inkling, an open-weight model tied to its Tinker platform, where customers pay usage-based compute fees to adapt models on proprietary data.
The company’s earlier funding set the tone. A $2 billion round last year valued Thinking Machines at $12 billion and was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction Partners joining in. Investors were buying Murati’s name, plus the cachet of former OpenAI researchers around her.
Since then, the roster has not stayed frozen. Several high-profile departures followed, including co-founders Lilian Weng and Luke Metz, who returned to OpenAI. That makes the new fundraise look less like a celebratory victory lap and more like a test of how much the market still wants the Murati story.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of deal that makes AI investors sound like they’ve misplaced the calculator and decided to price faith instead. An open-weight model and usage fees are a real business, but the market is still paying up first and asking about the product later. That works until it doesn’t, which is why these rounds keep getting bigger and stranger.
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