SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation, led by General Atlantic

AI chip company SambaNova Systems has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, led by General Atlantic (a growth-equity investment firm), in a first close of its Series F round — late-stage venture funding completed in tranches, with additional investors expected to join in a second close. “In the next few weeks, a few more investors will be coming in, and the second close is likely to finish up,” Rodrigo Liang, CEO and co-founder of SambaNova, told TechCrunch.

The round lands roughly five months after the Palo Alto, California-based company unveiled its SN50 chip alongside a $350 million Series E in February, and after a December report from Bloomberg News that SambaNova had been in acquisition talks with Intel at a valuation of roughly $1.6 billion. Asked whether closing its Series E and F rounds meant SambaNova, founded in 2017, had settled on staying independent, Liang was noncommittal. “We’re always being approached,” he said of ongoing acquisition interest. The door remains open to an exit in the dynamic AI market, he said, though momentum and growth will most likely drive the company toward “being public at some point.”

SambaNova’s ties to Intel, a backer since its Series C and a participant in this latest round, have deepened. Five months ago the company announced a multi-year partnership with Intel to support AI inference development based on Intel’s Xeon chip (Intel’s line of server processors), and the two now co-develop products and take them to market together. Separately, SambaNova has been selected by JPMorganChase as an “inference-infrastructure partner,” with its SN40L and SN50 systems set to power secure, on-premises AI inference at the bank. Liang called the JPMorgan decision “a big deal,” saying it signals that banks want infrastructure diversified beyond the cloud rather than complete dependence on cloud services.

Liang framed the JPMorgan win as evidence that enterprises and governments are only starting their AI journey, with growth so far concentrated among model makers and frontier labs, leaving what he called a huge amount of revenue untapped. SambaNova positions its edge as “premium inference” — running multi-trillion-parameter models fit onto a single rack for speed — and serves three customer types: sovereign clouds (government-funded private cloud buildouts with local partners), neoclouds (specialized AI-focused cloud providers), and enterprises building for their own use, including Saudi Aramco and Japanese firms alongside JPMorgan and Intel. Its SN40L launched in September 2023 and reached on-premises deployment that November; the SN50, unveiled in February 2026, is due to begin shipping in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner. Liang said the new capital will go toward scaling the business and securing its supply chain over the next 12 months. The round also includes Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital Group, and new and existing investors A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis.

Why it matters

Liang said the JPMorgan win sends a message to the banking industry that it’s time not to completely depend on cloud services, and signals to the broader market that enterprises and governments are just starting their AI journey — leaving, in his words, a huge amount of revenue still on the table.