AI, founded by the former Chief Technology Officer OpenAI Mira Murati, is in talks with investors for a new round of financing. According to The Information, the company plans to raise $1 billion and is valued at at least $40 billion. The current shareholders, Accel, are discussing taking the lead in the investment.

If this round of transactions is completed, the valuation of Thinking Machines will be lower than the $50 billion level it was said to be seeking at the end of last year. However, based on the current disclosed revenue scale, this valuation is still considered quite high.

Annualized revenue exceeds 100 million US dollars.

Insiders say that the current annualized revenue run rate of Thinking Machines has exceeded $100 million. Calculated in this way, even if the company's valuation reaches $40 billion, its revenue multiple is still quite high.

In July this year, Thinking Machines launched the open-weight model Inkling. This model provides a pay-per-compute-power service through the Tinker platform, allowing customers to adapt the model to their proprietary data. This has also become one of the company's current sources of revenue.

The valuation in the last round of financing was $12 billion.

Prior to this, Thinking Machines completed a $2 billion financing round, which was one of the largest in its seed funding phase. At that time, the company was valued at $12 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the investment, and institutions such as Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction Partners also participating in the round.

At that time, one of the key bets made by investors was on the resume of Murati himself, as well as the appeal brought by several former OpenAI researchers joining the team.

Some co-founders have left.

However, since then, several core members of Thinking Machines have also resigned. Reports indicate that some co-founders have left the company, including Lilian Weng and Luke Metz, who later returned to OpenAI.

As of now, neither Accel nor Thinking Machines has immediately responded to requests for comments.