The Information reports that Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is in talks to raise more than $1 billion at a valuation above $40 billion. The Information's Stephanie Palazzolo called it "an impressive multiple for a startup generating 100s of millions in annual revenue" — fast revenue traction for a lab that's a little over a year and a half old, and a number enthusiastic enough that reactions on X, including from All-In podcast host Jason Calacanis ("my lord... you go, girlfriend"), skewed celebratory rather than skeptical.
The trajectory, so far
Thinking Machines closed one of the largest seed rounds in venture-capital history in mid-2025: around $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street participating. A close anywhere near the new $40 billion figure would be more than 3x that seed valuation in about a year — a steep climb by any standard. The number now in talks is below the $50 billion-plus reportedly discussed last fall, though valuations move, sometimes more than once, over the course of a fundraise; neither the specific investors nor a closing date has been reported yet.
Where that puts it against other AI money news this week
For scale: Mistral is reportedly in talks for a new round near €20 billion, up from €12 billion, and NVIDIA's acquisition of Hugging Face landed at $12.93 billion. Even at the lower end of what's being discussed, Thinking Machines' reported $40 billion-plus valuation would sit well above both — a research-focused lab founded in February 2025, without a flagship consumer product on the scale of ChatGPT or Claude, being valued above a sovereign national champion and above what NVIDIA just paid for the platform hosting most of the world's open-weight models.
What isn't confirmed yet
The Information's own framing is "in talks," not a signed term sheet, and neither Thinking Machines nor its investors have commented publicly. The exact revenue figure behind "100s of millions" also hasn't been disclosed, so the multiple implied by the new valuation is directionally striking rather than precisely calculable from what's public so far.