SambaNova, An AI infrastructure Company Co-Founded By Stanford University Professor Kunle Olukotun, Closes $1B Financing Round – AfroTech
SambaNova closed its Series F round.
Founded in 2017 and based in San Jose, CA, the company positions itself as a leading provider of AI infrastructure. It delivers a full-stack platform including chips, systems, and cloud services to support developers, enterprises, governments, and data centers. The company said in a press release that its infrastructure enables customers to “deploy state-of-the-art models with superior performance, lower total cost of ownership, and rapid time to value.”
Among the company’s co-founders is Chief Technologist Kunle Olukotun, Cadence Design Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He previously founded Afara Websystems in 2000, which was acquired two years later, and helped pioneer chip multiprocessor designs, according to his biography.
“The future of the AI inference data center will be dominated by heterogeneous, disaggregated compute systems and SambaNova chips will be the lynchpin by providing the fastest and most economical decode compute,” Olukotun wrote on LinkedIn.
Series F Raise
SambaNova closed a $1 billion strategic Series F financing round, placing the company’s valuation at $11 billion, according to the press release. General Atlantic led the round while Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., and Capital Group providing significant investment. New and existing investors include A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Cambium Capital, Intel Capital, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis.
“SambaNova’s platform is differentiated, built for a market where inference has become foundational to enterprise and industry transformation,” said Martín Escobari, co-president and head of global growth equity at General Atlantic, in the press release. “…We are pleased to lead this round to support SambaNova in shaping the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova’s co-founder and CEO, also commented: “SambaNova’s $11 billion valuation highlights the central role that fast inference now plays in the enterprise AI stack.”
The funding will support customer programs, additional capacity, product innovation, and deployments to enterprises, neo-clouds, sovereign AI customers, and service providers globally. SambaNova said it will also continue investing in chips, systems, software, and full-stack AI infrastructure.
Additionally, SambaNova will deploy its SN40 and SN50 systems at JPMorganChase as an inference infrastructure partner.
“At JPMorganChase, AI infrastructure has to meet a very high bar for performance, control and reliability,” said JPMorganChase CIO of Infrastructure Platforms Darrin Alves in the press release. “We’re excited to deploy SambaNova’s RDU architecture and looking forward to testing its speed and security for on-prem inference in our demanding enterprise AI workloads.”
