AI chip startup SambaNova hits $11B valuation with $1B raise

AI chip startup SambaNova Systems has secured $1 billion in new funding, pushing its valuation to $11 billion in the first close of its Series F round, led by General Atlantic. Additional investors are expected to join in the coming weeks.

“In the next few weeks, a few more investors will be coming in, and the second close is likely to finish up,” said Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, in an interview.

This latest capital injection arrives roughly five months after the Palo Alto, California-based company unveiled its SN50 chip and closed a $350 million Series E round in February. The startup, founded in 2017, was also reportedly in acquisition talks with Intel late last year, with Bloomberg News valuing a potential deal at around $1.6 billion.

When asked whether closing both the Series E and F rounds signaled a commitment to staying independent, Liang remained noncommittal. He noted that the company continues to receive interest from potential suitors. “We’re always being approached,” he said, leaving the door open to an exit in the fast-moving AI market. However, he added that momentum and growth will most likely steer the company toward “being public at some point.”

SambaNova’s relationship with Intel has deepened. Intel, a backer since the startup’s Series C, participated in this latest round. Five months ago, the nine-year-old company announced a multi-year partnership with Intel to support AI inference development based on Intel’s Xeon chip. The two now co-develop products and bring them to market together. “That gives us a great relationship with them that lets us leverage the scale of Intel with the technology we have,” Liang explained.

Alongside the new funding, SambaNova revealed that JPMorganChase has selected it as an “inference-infrastructure partner.” The bank will deploy SambaNova’s SN40L and SN50 systems for secure, on-premises AI inference.

“Having JPMorgan Chase decide they’re going to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal,” Liang said. “It sends a message to the banking industry that it’s time not to completely depend on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous [infrastructure].”

Liang described the JPMorgan win as a signal to the broader market. Banks “of the caliber of JP Morgan” are building their own private, secure infrastructure to run inference on their most sensitive models, a move he expects to resonate beyond banking. Enterprises and governments are “just starting their AI journey,” he noted, with most growth so far concentrated among tech’s model makers and frontier labs. That leaves “a huge amount of revenue” still on the table, he added.

SambaNova launched its SN40L in September 2023, available in the cloud and on-premises from November 2023. Its next-generation SN50, unveiled in February 2026, is slated to begin shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner.

Liang emphasized SambaNova’s edge as “premium inference,” running the largest models at high speed. Today’s frontier models span trillions of parameters, and SambaNova was built specifically to handle them at that scale. The company fits multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack, enabling fast performance.

SambaNova serves three types of customers: sovereign clouds, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds; neoclouds; and enterprises building for their own use. In addition to JPMorgan, its customers include Saudi Aramco, Intel, and several Japanese firms.

The company will use the new capital to scale its business and strengthen its supply chain amid what Liang called an incredible wave of demand. “We’re using that capital to secure the supply chain,” he said, describing it as essential to fulfilling orders and buying the materials needed over the next 12 months.

Other investors in the round include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group. New and existing participants also joined, such as A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis.