Mira Murati's start-up is said to be on the verge of raising 5 billion dollars, with Accel as lead investor
That would value Thinking Machines Lab at 40 billion dollars before the new money, more than three times last year's figure.
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI company founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, may close a 5 billion dollar funding round within days. Business Insider reported this, as cited by Tech Funding News. Investment firm Accel is said to be leading the round at a valuation of 40 billion dollars before the capital injection, or about 45 billion afterwards. The company declined to comment and Accel did not respond, Dataconomy writes.
Last year the start-up raised 2 billion dollars at a valuation of around 12 billion, from investors including Accel, a16z, Nvidia and AMD. An earlier attempt to raise money at 50 billion dollars was abandoned, according to Dataconomy. Tech Funding News recalls that Thinking Machines signed a multi-year deal with Nvidia in March for at least one gigawatt of computing capacity, suggesting the new money will largely go there.
Revenue comes mainly from Tinker, a service that lets organisations fine-tune models on their own data. On Thursday the company made Inkling 2 Small available there, a model for coding and visual tasks with 594 billion parameters in total, of which about 17 billion are active per request. The full weights will follow under an open-source licence after further safety testing.