AI Industry Map / Data and models / Thinking Machines Lab

Frontier model labs Training and fine-tuning

Thinking Machines Lab

Lab founded by former OpenAI leaders, which sells Tinker for managed fine-tuning of open models.

Revenue: Annualised run rate above $100M, self-reported and unaudited
Value: Talks for at least $1B at $40B or more reported in September 2026. Earlier round about $12B post-money in July 2025
Growth: Tinker launched in October 2025 and became generally available that December (company)
Based in: San Francisco, US
Listed: Private

Why it is winning

Tinker gives developers fine-tuning without running their own clusters, and it added full fine-tuning in beta in October 2026 (company).

The risk to watch

Talks at about $50B collapsed in January 2026, and the revenue figures are self-reported.

Money coming in

Who pays Thinking Machines Lab, and for what.

NvidiapaysThinking Machines LabAbout $2.5B in reported talks (September 2026, not closed)
Reported to be in talks to invest in the lab
letsdatascience.com

Money going out

Who Thinking Machines Lab pays to do what it does.

No suppliers of Thinking Machines Lab mapped yet.

Where it sits on the map

Frontier model labs

ex-OpenAI founders

Training and fine-tuning

managed fine-tuning across many open models

Competitors and neighbours

Makes ChatGPT, the assistant most people use, and sells its models to businesses through an API.

About $13B revenue in 2025, against about $34B of costs (reported)

Makes Claude and Claude Code, and is strongest with businesses and software builders.

Annualised revenue run rate above $65B at the end of July 2026, reported from an investor update (Aug 2026)

Makes Gemini, the assistant built into Android, Search and Workspace.

25% of AI chip supply (Epoch AI)

Sells Microsoft 365 Copilot inside Office and Windows, and owns a large stake in OpenAI.

20M+ users (2025)

Builds Meta AI into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and makes the Ray-Ban glasses with EssilorLuxottica.

Sales more than tripled (H1 2025)

Designs its own Trainium AI chips and rents them out through AWS.

5% of AI chip supply (Epoch AI)

French lab with open and paid models, chosen by European firms that want data kept in Europe.

About $14B valuation (Sep 2025)

Lab that aims to build frontier open-weight models in the US, backed by Nvidia.

$8B after a $2B round led by Nvidia in October 2025. Talks at $25B reported in 2026

Chinese research lab that releases its strongest models as open weights.

About 475M yuan (about $70.7M) in the first seven months of 2026 (The Information, reported)

Sources: americanbazaaronline.com, runtimewire.com, fourweekmba.com

The map updates three times a week.

241 companies across 25 areas, 62 money flows and 89 openings so far. New research lands every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Back to the full map

Free daily email

Get the map updates in your inbox

A short read every morning on what is moving in AI, including new areas of the map as they go live. Free.