Thinking Machines Lab is reportedly in talks to raise $5 to $6 billion at a $40 billion valuation, with Nvidia supplying roughly half. Zeki's data explains why investors are prepared to write that cheque — and where the risks sit.
Frontier AI was supposed to be a closed shop. The compute required to train models at scale, the data, the research talent — all of it concentrated in a handful of companies with a decade's head start and near-infinite balance sheets. That logic held for long enough to make it a consensus. It is no longer holding.
Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI. By July 2025 it had raised $2 billion — one of the largest seed rounds in history — at a $12 billion post-money valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Nvidia, GV and Lightspeed. In July 2026 it shipped Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weight model trained across text, image, audio and video, available to any developer under Apache 2.0. Its annual revenue run rate is reported at over $100 million.