Thinking Machines Lab

Customizable AI that people shape, through open-weights frontier models plus Tinker, a fine-tuning/RL training API, and 'interaction models' that process audio, video and text in real time (200 ms micro-turns) instead of waiting for turn-taking.

Founded
February 2025
Headquarters
San Francisco, CA
Founders
Mira Murati, John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, Luke Metz
Pushes against
One-size-fits-all closed frontier models and turn-based chat interfaces.
Now
Shipped Tinker and Inkling, with run-rate revenue above $100M (reported). Most co-founders left. Tulloch went to Meta (2025-10), and Zoph and Metz to OpenAI (2026-01). Reported talks to raise $1B at $40B (2026-09-03), after an earlier $50B round collapsed.

Key people

  • Mira Murati (CEO)
  • John Schulman (chief scientist)
  • Soumith Chintala (CTO since 2026-01)

Funding

  • September 2026 reported
    Amount
    $1B (reported talks)
    Valuation
    $40B (reported)
    Lead
    Accel (reported)
    Source techcrunch.com
  • March 2026
    Amount
    undisclosed ('significant investment')
    Lead
    Nvidia, with a >=1 GW Vera Rubin compute deal for early 2027
    Source thinkingmachines.ai
  • July 2025
    Amount
    $2B seed
    Valuation
    $12B
    Lead
    Andreessen Horowitz (Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, Conviction)
    Source techcrunch.com

Every funding round in the atlas

Launches

  • Tinker 1 October 2025
    Thinking Machines Lab's first product, Tinker, is an API for fine-tuning open-weights models. You write the training loop and they run it on their GPUs.

People moves

Of the moves the atlas tracks, 0 joined and 4 left.

Sources

  1. thinkingmachines.ai/news/
  2. thinkingmachines.ai/blog/
  3. thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/
  4. thinkingmachines.ai/news/nvidia-partnership/
  5. thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
  6. techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/accel-reportedly-in-talks-to-lead-1b-round-for-thinking-machines
  7. techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/mira-muratis-startup-thinking-machines-lab-is-losing-two-of-its-
  8. cryptobriefing.com/thinking-machines-lab-40b-valuation/
  9. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Lab

This profile was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check