Thinking Machines Lab Seeks $5 Billion at $40 Billion Pre-Money Valuation

Thinking Machines Lab is seeking $5 billion at a $40 billion pre-money valuation, a target well above its previous seed-round valuation.

Former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati founded the company. It completed a $2 billion seed round early last year at a valuation above $10 billion. A later effort to raise funding at a $50 billion valuation broke down in negotiations. The current target is $3 billion larger than the seed round.

The lab released its second-generation model, Inkling 2 Small, on Nov. 6. It uses a mixture-of-experts architecture and has a 594B-A17B parameter scale. Training involved four stages of pretraining and nine days of joint reinforcement learning.

Thinking Machines Lab said Inkling 2 Small scored far above its earlier models on analytical intelligence, with improvements in coding, vision, knowledge work and reasoning. The company plans to make the model’s weights available under the Apache 2.0 license next week.