Thinking Machines的开源权重押注：Murati的实验室在20亿美元种子轮后洽谈400亿美元估值

做的是什么生意

Thinking Machines is an AI lab founded in early 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati with roughly two dozen OpenAI veterans; it ships open-weight models such as Inkling and Tinker, a platform where customers pay usage-based compute fees to adapt those models on their own data.

启动资金：$2B seed at a $12B valuation (July 2025), led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed and Conviction Partners

起因

Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, founded Thinking Machines in early 2025 and roughly two dozen OpenAI researchers followed her. Investors backed the lab largely on that pedigree, closing a $2 billion seed round in July 2025 — one of the largest seed financings in history — at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed and Conviction Partners.

经过

By November 2025 the lab was in talks at a $50–60 billion valuation on the strength of one shipped product, Tinker. Those talks collapsed in January 2026 after co-founder and CTO Barret Zoph left mid-all-hands and returned to OpenAI within the hour, joined by co-founder Luke Metz and researcher Sam Schoenholz; the private mark reset to the $12 billion seed price, and founding researcher Lilian Weng left for OpenAI in July. In that same month the company shipped Inkling, an open-weight model that earns revenue through usage-based compute fees on Tinker, and by September its annualized revenue run rate exceeded $100 million.

结果

As of 2026-09-06 Thinking Machines is live and in late-stage funding talks: Accel is reported to be leading a $1B raise at a valuation of at least $40B, with Nvidia also discussed, after the company's first $50B valuation attempt fell apart under a leadership exodus.

可借鉴之处

背景赢得首轮融资，产品赢得第二轮：创始人品牌带来了创纪录的种子轮，但只有在产品上线并产生营收后，估值才得以维持。