AI chip company SambaNova Systems raised $1 billion in an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic in the first close of its Series F round, with more investors expected to join soon.
“In the coming weeks, a few more investors will come and the second close is likely to be completed,” Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, told TechCrunch.
The latest round comes about five months after the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup company revealed the SN50 chipparallel to a $350 million Series E in February. SambaNova has also been in acquisition talks with Intel, a deal that valued it at about $1.6 billion, according to December report from Bloomberg News.
Asked if the closing of the Series E and F rounds meant that SambaNova, founded in 2017, had decided to remain independent, Liang was noncommittal. He said the company remains interested. “They always approach us.” The door is open to such an exit in this dynamic AI market, the CEO said, but momentum and growth will likely lead the company to “go public at some point.”
SambaNova’s ties to Intela Series C backer and a participant in this latest round, have gone deep. Five months ago, the nine-year-old startup was announced a multi-year partnership with Intel to support the development of AI inference based on Intel’s Xeon chip; The two now jointly develop products and take them to market together. “This gives us a great relationship with them that allows us to leverage Intel’s scale with the technology we have,” Liang said.
Alongside the new funding, SambaNova said it has been selected by JPMorganChase as an “inference infrastructure partner”, with its SN40L and SN50 systems powering secure, in-house AI inference at the bank.
“JPMorgan Chase deciding to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal,” Liang told TechCrunch. “It sends a message to the banking industry that it is time to stop being completely dependent on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous [infrastructure].”
Liang said JPMorgan’s win was a signal to the broader market. Banks “of the caliber of JPMorgan” are now building their own private, secure infrastructure to make inferences about their most sensitive models, he said, a move he expects to resonate beyond the banking sector. Businesses and governments are “just beginning their AI journey,” Liang continued, with most of the development so far concentrated in the technology’s model makers and frontier labs, leaving what he called “a huge amount of revenue” still on the table.
SambaNova has been released SN40L in September 2023, available in the cloud and on premises from November 2023. Its next-generation SN50, unveiled in February 2026, is set to start shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first development partner, Liang noted.
Liang said SambaNova’s advantage is the “premium conclusion” of running the larger models and running them fast. Today’s frontier models span trillions of parameters, and he said SambaNova was built specifically to handle them at that scale. The company places multi-trillion parameter models on a single rack that helps them run quickly.
SambaNova sees three types of customers. The first is mainstream clouds, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds, a push that Liang expects SambaNova to capitalize on. The second is neoclouds. The third is businesses that build for their own use. In addition to JPMorgan, it also names Saudi Aramco, Intel and other Japanese companies as clients.
SambaNova will use the proceeds to scale the business and shore up its supply chain against what Liang called an incredible surge in demand. “We are using this capital to secure the supply chain,” he said, describing it as necessary to fulfill orders and purchase the materials the company needs to deliver over the next 12 months.
Other investors participating in the round include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates and Capital Group. New and existing investors also joined, including A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners and Volantis.
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