OpenAI's former CTO, Murati, founded a startup less than two years ago, and Thinking Machines' valuation has soared to $40 billion.

Dynamic Beating AI NewsFlash: Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is in talks for a new round of funding. The company plans to raise at least $10 billion, with a pre-money valuation of at least $400 billion. Current investor Accel is in talks to lead the round, and Nvidia is also considering participation. The transaction has not yet been finalized.

This valuation is much higher than the previous round. When Thinking Machines raised $20 billion last year, the pre-money valuation was $100 billion, and post-money was $120 billion. Based on the same pre-money basis, the new valuation is already at least 4 times that of over a year ago. However, the company sought a valuation of over $50 billion at the end of last year, which has now been adjusted downwards.

The company has also started generating significant revenue, with annualized revenue of at least several billion dollars. Revenue mainly comes from Tinker, where customers pay to use its computing power and tools to fine-tune AI models on their data. The first in-house open-weight model, Inkling, has also been integrated into Tinker.

This year, Thinking Machines also signed a long-term computing power agreement with Nvidia, planning to deploy at least 1GW of the Vera Rubin system, with Nvidia increasing its investment. The new round of funding will continue to be used for model training, server leasing, and hiring.