Who's who · Frontier labs
Thinking Machines Lab
Mira Murati's AI lab, maker of the Tinker fine-tuning service and the open-weight Inkling models.
At a glance
- Founded
- February 2025
- Based in
- San Francisco, United States
- People
- Mira Murati, Chief executive and founder
- Known for
- Tinker, Inkling, Inkling-Small
- Licence
- Apache 2.0 (Inkling models)
- Funding
- Private; valued at $12bn after a $2bn seed round (2025); NVIDIA invested in March 2026
- Annual revenue run rate
- More than $100 million (September 2026, reported)
- Website
- https://thinkingmachines.ai
Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded in early 2025 by Mira Murati, formerly chief technology officer of OpenAI. Its stated aim is to make AI systems more widely understood, more customisable and more capable, with an emphasis on people working alongside AI and on sharing research openly.
Its first product, Tinker, is a service for fine-tuning open models (adapting them with an organisation's own data) without managing the computing infrastructure. In July 2026 the lab released Inkling, its first in-house model, as open weights. It is a mixture-of-experts model, meaning only part of it runs for each task: it has 975 billion parameters in total and uses about 41 billion at a time. A smaller sibling, Inkling-Small, has since followed. Both take text, images and audio, and both are published under Apache 2.0.
The company raised a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation in 2025, and in March 2026 agreed a multiyear partnership with NVIDIA that includes an NVIDIA investment and at least one gigawatt of computing capacity. Several co-founders have since left.
Sources
- Thinking Machines Lab, Inkling, 2026-10-02
- TechCrunch, Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling, 2026-07-15
- CNBC, Nvidia makes 'significant investment' in Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, 2026-03-10
- TechCrunch, Accel reportedly in talks to lead $1B round for Thinking Machines at $40B valuation, 2026-09-03
Facts last checked 2026-10-02