Is Thinking Machines Lab publicly traded?

Thinking Machines Lab is a private company; its shares do not trade on a public exchange.

When was Thinking Machines Lab founded and where is it based?

Thinking Machines Lab was founded in 2025 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Who leads Thinking Machines Lab?

Mira Murati (Founder, Thinking Machines Lab).

Foundation Model Lab

Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab is Mira Murati's $12B startup selling Tinker fine-tuning and the open-weight Inkling model.

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, sells Tinker — an API for fine-tuning open models into portable LoRA weights customers own — and ships Inkling, its first open-weight model, built for low-latency interaction with a target around 200 milliseconds per response. A seed round near $2 billion set a $12 billion valuation, and a multiyear Nvidia agreement supplies Vera Rubin chips. The team is still under 200 people.

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Mira Murati@miramurati

Why it matters

This is the cleanest test of a contrarian thesis: that enterprises want AI they can own and customize, not the biggest frontier model they can rent. Shipping open weights means handing competitors the artifact and betting the business on the tooling around it. If Tinker's weights-you-own pitch wins real contracts, every closed lab's pricing model has a problem.

Core moat

The founding team is the asset — a dense cluster of OpenAI alumni with Murati at the center — and the moat under construction is Tinker becoming the default place enterprises encode their own data and values into weights they control. Portability is the pitch, which makes the moat deliberately paradoxical.

Risks

Open weights cut both ways: Inkling's best ideas are copyable the day they ship, and hyperscalers can bundle fine-tuning at zero margin. At $12 billion on two young products, the gap between valuation and proof is wider here than at any comparable lab.

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Who runs Thinking Machines Lab

Mira MuratiFounder, Thinking Machines Lab

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Frequently asked about Thinking Machines Lab

What does Thinking Machines Lab do?: Thinking Machines Lab is Mira Murati's $12B startup selling Tinker fine-tuning and the open-weight Inkling model.
Is Thinking Machines Lab publicly traded?: Thinking Machines Lab is a private company; its shares do not trade on a public exchange.
When was Thinking Machines Lab founded and where is it based?: Thinking Machines Lab was founded in 2025 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Who leads Thinking Machines Lab?: Mira Murati (Founder, Thinking Machines Lab).
What is Thinking Machines Lab's competitive advantage?: The founding team is the asset — a dense cluster of OpenAI alumni with Murati at the center — and the moat under construction is Tinker becoming the default place enterprises encode their own data and values into weights they control. Portability is the pitch, which makes the moat deliberately paradoxical.