Mira Murati’s AI Startup Thinking Machines Lab Gunning For $40B Valuation

Thinking Machines Lab is negotiating a new funding round at a $40B valuation, more than tripling the $12B post-money valuation it secured during its $2B seed financing in July 2025. The startup previously explored a follow-on raise at a $50B valuation in late 2025, but those talks collapsed by early 2026. The company's hardware strategy relies on a multi-year partnership with Nvidia signed in March 2026, granting the startup access to at least 1 gigawatt of compute capacity—dwarfing standard data centers that consume 50 to 100 megawatts. Despite its massive compute footprint, the public benefit corporation remains exceptionally small, operating with only 100 to 200 employees as of mid-2026. The funding push follows the July 15 release of Inkling, a multimodal foundation model containing 975 billion parameters.