Artificial intelligence chip maker SambaNova raises $1 billion at a valuation of $11 billion, 5 months after its last massive round

Artificial intelligence chip company Sambanova Systems It raised $1 billion at a valuation of $11 billion, led by General Atlantic, in the first closing of its Series F round, with more investors expected to join soon.

“In the next few weeks, a few investors will come, and the second lockdown will likely end,” Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, told TechCrunch.

The latest round comes roughly five months after the Palo Alto, California-based startup launched It revealed the SN50 chipalong with A $350 million Series E in February. SambaNova was also in acquisition talks with Intel, a deal valued at about $1.6 billion, according to December report from Bloomberg News.

Asked whether closing the Series E and F rounds meant SambaNova, founded in 2017, had settled into remaining independent, Liang was noncommittal. He said the company continues to show interest. “We’re always getting closer.” The CEO said the door is open for such an exit in this dynamic AI market, but momentum and growth will likely push the company toward “going public at some point.”

SambaNova’s relationships Intela backer since the Series C and participant in this latest round, delved deeper. Five months ago, the nine-year-old startup took off Announce Multi-year partnership with Intel to support the development of AI inference based on the Intel Xeon chip. The two are now involved in developing products and taking them to market together. “This gives us a great relationship with them, allowing us to leverage Intel’s scale with our technology,” 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 set to run secure AI inference within 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’s time to not rely entirely on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous (infrastructure).”

Liang said JPMorgan’s win was a signal to the broader market. He said banks “of JPMorgan’s calibre” are now building their own secure inference infrastructure for their most sensitive models, a move he expects to reverberate beyond banking. Liang continued that companies and governments are “just starting their AI journey,” with most of the growth so far concentrated among technology model makers and frontier laboratories, leaving what he called “a huge amount of revenue” on the table.

Launched SambaNova SN40L In September 2023, it will be available in the cloud and on-premises November 2023. Liang noted that the next-generation SN50, unveiled in February 2026, is scheduled to begin shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner.

Liang said SambaNova’s advantage is “outstanding heuristics” that gets the largest models up and running quickly. Current frontier models include trillions of parameters, and he said SambaNova was specifically designed to handle them at that scale. The company mounts models with several trillion parameters on a single rack, which helps them work quickly.

SambaNova sees three types of customers. The first is sovereign cloud, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds, a push in which Liang expects Sampanova to play a central role. The second is the new cloud. The third is to build institutions for their own use. In addition to JP Morgan, it also includes Saudi Aramco, Intel and other Japanese companies as clients.

SambaNova will use the proceeds to expand the business and shore up its supply chain against what Liang called a dizzying wave of demand. “We are using this capital to secure the supply chain,” he said, describing it as essential to fulfill orders and procure 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.