Rumor has it that OpenAI CTO startup Thinking Machines is negotiating a new round of financing at a valuation of 40 billion US dollars, and Nvidia and Accel plan to raise the bill

The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to reports, the artificial intelligence (AI) lab Thinking Machines, led by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, is negotiating a new round of financing with investors, and the valuation is expected to reach 40 billion US dollars.

The report quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that the existing investor Accel has begun discussions to lead this round of financing, while NVDA.US (NVDA.US), which has previously taken a stake in the company, is also negotiating additional investment. As of now, Accel, Nvidia, and Thinking Machines have not responded to requests for comment.

Looking back at July 2025, Thinking Machines completed a round of financing of 2 billion US dollars. At the time, the valuation was 10 billion US dollars. The round of financing was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), followed by Nvidia, AMD (AMD.US), ServiceNow, and Cisco (CSCO.US).

In March of this year, Nvidia and Thinking Machines reached a multi-year cooperation agreement. The former not only made a “significant” investment in the AI startup, but also promised to supply it with chips.

In July of this year, Thinking Machines released its first self-developed AI model, Inkling. The model uses an open weighting model, and developers and enterprises can freely download and modify it according to their own needs.

Inkling's total training parameters reached 975B, including 41B activation parameters; its context window supports up to 1 million tokens, and pre-training was completed on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video data. This model is the first product in the Thinking Machines multi-size model family, which also includes a lightweight version, the Inkling-Small.

Recently, there have been some changes in Thinking Machines' management. In July of this year, it was revealed that co-founder Lilian Weng left the company and returned to OpenAI. She previously served as OpenAI's vice president of security research. Another co-founder, Barrett Zoph, has joined Google (GOOGL.US), and Andrew Tulloch is currently an AI researcher at Meta Platforms (META.US). Luke Metz is also said to have left his job, but his LinkedIn page hasn't been updated.