---
title: "Accel set to lead $5 billion into Thinking Machines at a $40 billion valuation"
description: "The unconfirmed round values the lab founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati at roughly 400 times its reported revenue, for a model whose open-licensed weights are still withheld. Their release, promised within weeks, is the first fact under the price that anyone outside can check."
publisher: "The Inference"
section: "Deals"
published: 2026-11-10T16:43:07.989Z
modified: 2026-11-10T16:43:07.989Z
canonical: https://theinference.org/article/accel-set-to-lead-5-billion-into-thinking-machines-at-a-40-billion-valuation
language: en
keywords: "Venture Capital, Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati, Valuation, AI Models, Open Weights"
---

# Accel set to lead $5 billion into Thinking Machines at a $40 billion valuation

> The unconfirmed round values the lab founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati at roughly 400 times its reported revenue, for a model whose open-licensed weights are still withheld. Their release, promised within weeks, is the first fact under the price that anyone outside can check.

The venture firm Accel is set to lead a $5 billion round into [Thinking Machines Lab](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/thinking-machines-lab) at a $40 billion valuation before the money arrives, [Business Insider reported on November 6, 2026](https://snowrock.com/insights/thinking-machines-lab-funding-tinker); the company, founded by former [OpenAI](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/openai) chief technology officer Mira Murati, declined to comment and Accel did not respond [1][2].

The mark was set the night after Inkling 2 Small went live on Tinker, the lab's paid service for retraining models on customers' own data, with the weights, the files needed to run a copy, withheld pending outside safety testing [2][3][4]. The wager is defensible, but it rests on the service rather than the benchmark headline, and the service bills by the token.

## The cheap token buys an expensive answer

Inkling 2 Small uses a mixture-of-experts design, which routes each query to a few specialist sub-networks, so 17 billion of its 594 billion parameters work at a time [4][5]. Artificial Analysis, an independent model-benchmarking firm, scores it 31 on [its intelligence index](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/inkling-2-small), well above the median of 24 for its price tier [6].

Per task, the bill is another matter: $1.18 of compute against $0.20 for the earlier Inkling-Small, because the new model writes about 150,000 output tokens a task where the old one wrote 37,000 [4][6]. On Terminal-Bench, a test of agentic coding in a live terminal, it scores 13 percent against Claude Sonnet 5.5's 30 [4]. Tinker prices the model at $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.00 per million output [4][6]. Because the vendor sells tokens, a longer answer raises the customer's bill and the lab's revenue with it.

*Chart: **Inkling 2 Small's per-task cost sits far above its predecessor and far below the frontier** Bar chart of cost per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task: Inkling-Small $0.20, MiMo-V2.6-Pro $0.26, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash $0.60, Inkling 2 Small $1.18, GPT-6.1 Sol $1.27, GPT-6 Astra $6.24, Claude Opus 5.5 $10.04*

*Weighted average cost in US dollars per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task at listed API prices, November 2026; the Inkling-Small figure from Artificial Analysis results reported by FomoEra. [4][6]*

## What the money is being asked to buy

The reported price is 20 percent below the $50 billion the lab sought, and abandoned, in late 2025, though well above its July 2025 seed; Accel's talks at that valuation floor first surfaced in September, when the round under discussion was $1 billion [2][7]. [A September report put annualized revenue above $100 million](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/accel-reportedly-talks-lead-1b-193629728.html) [2][7]. Against that, the valuation, not the check, is the multiple: roughly 400 times sales [2][7].

Underneath the price sit an undisclosed [Nvidia](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/nvidia) investment from March, at least a gigawatt of Vera Rubin, the Nvidia platform due to follow its current Blackwell chips, from early 2027, and The Information's report that Nvidia weighed about $2.5 billion of this round [1][2]. Four of the lab's six named cofounders have left [2].

The durable asset is Tinker: the hedge fund Bridgewater used it to fine-tune an open Qwen3 model for financial filtering, beating GPT-5.5's accuracy on six tasks at about a fourteenth of the inference cost [5]. Among open models, though, the new Inkling placed second on four of six code benchmarks and first on none [5].

*Chart: **The reported $40 billion sits below the $50 billion Thinking Machines abandoned** Bar chart of Thinking Machines Lab valuations: $12 billion seed in July 2025, $50 billion sought in late 2025 and abandoned, $40 billion reported Accel round in November 2026*

*Pre-money company valuations in billions of US dollars. The late-2025 figure is a sought valuation whose talks were abandoned; the November 2026 figure is reported round terms the company has not confirmed. [2][7]*

## The download is the first real test

[The lab's own page says](https://thinkingmachines.ai/inkling) the model "is closed weight at release", with the full files due "in the coming weeks" under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, once outside safety testing ends [4][8]. The first Inkling shipped open on day one in July [2].

This week also set the public comparison. [Anthropic](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/anthropic), maker of Claude, [filed on November 10 for an IPO](https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-ipo-raise-much-644-billion-latest-draft-prospectus-shows-2026-11-10/) valuing it at up to $1.4 trillion on roughly $81 billion of run-rate revenue [9]. That filing is the test for the private mark: about 400 times reported sales for Thinking Machines, against about 17 times run-rate revenue at the top of Anthropic's range [2][9]. The gap between those multiples is a growth claim, and nothing published yet substantiates it.

Fine-tuning as a business is real, and this round bets it compounds at gigawatt scale. The date to watch is the weights release: once the files are public, anyone with the hardware can run the model and judge it for themselves.

## Takeaway

Accel's reported $5 billion at $40 billion prices Thinking Machines at about 400 times sales; the open-weights release due within weeks is the first checkable fact under the price.

## Sources

1. [SnowRock, Thinking Machines Lab is in talks for a $5 billion funding round, 9 November 2026](https://snowrock.com/insights/thinking-machines-lab-funding-tinker)
2. [GadgetsNow, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines nears a $40 billion valuation with $5 billion from Accel, 9 November 2026](https://gadgetsnow.indiatimes.com/tech-news/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-nears-a-40-billion-valuation-with-5-billion-from-accel/articleshow/135633041.cms)
3. [SiliconANGLE, Thinking Machines debuts Inkling 2 Small amid reported $5B fundraising push, 6 November 2026](https://siliconangle.com/2026/11/06/thinking-machines-debuts-inkling-2-small-amid-reported-5b-fundraising-push/)
4. [FomoEra, Thinking Machines presenta Inkling 2 Small y mantiene sus pesos cerrados por ahora, 10 November 2026](https://fomoera.com/thinking-machines-inkling-2-small-pesos/)
5. [Tecnología Geek, Thinking Machines Lab, Inkling 2 Small y US$40.000 millones, 10 November 2026](https://tecnologiageek.com/thinking-machines-lab-inkling-2-small/)
6. [Artificial Analysis, Inkling 2 Small: Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis, accessed 10 November 2026](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/inkling-2-small)
7. [Yahoo Finance, Accel reportedly in talks to lead $1B round for Thinking Machines at $40B valuation, 3 September 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/accel-reportedly-talks-lead-1b-193629728.html)
8. [Thinking Machines Lab, Inkling model family page, accessed 10 November 2026](https://thinkingmachines.ai/inkling)
9. [Reuters, Anthropic eyes $1.4 trillion IPO valuation in test of Wall Street's AI fervor, 10 November 2026](https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-ipo-raise-much-644-billion-latest-draft-prospectus-shows-2026-11-10/)


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Accel set to lead $5 billion into Thinking Machines at a $40 billion valuation — The Inference. Canonical: https://theinference.org/article/accel-set-to-lead-5-billion-into-thinking-machines-at-a-40-billion-valuation