SambaNova
California company that designs its own AI chips, rack systems, software and cloud service for inference. Founded in 2017 from Stanford research, it announced a USD 1 billion Series F first close at an USD 11 billion valuation in July 2026.
Industry: AI inference chips, systems and cloud | Location: San Jose, United States | Founded: 2017 | Total Funding: USD 1.8B
About SambaNova
SambaNova Systems is a Palo Alto, California, company that designs custom silicon, full-stack systems and software for artificial intelligence, with a current focus on inference, the stage at which a trained model answers queries. It does not compete directly in the general-purpose graphics processors that made Nvidia dominant in model training. The company positions itself as a provider of fast, power-efficient inference for very large models and stresses on-premises deployment, arguing that keeping inference inside a customer's own facilities is faster and more secure than renting cloud capacity. SambaNova was founded in 2017 by Rodrigo Liang, Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Ré, commercialising research from Stanford University. Liang, a former senior vice president of processor development at Oracle, is chief executive. Olukotun, a Stanford professor, serves as chief technologist, and Ré is also a Stanford professor. The company emerged from stealth with a USD 56 million Series A co-led by Walden International and GV, which also brought Lip-Bu Tan and Dave Munichiello onto its board. A July 2026 report describes Tan, who is now chief executive of Intel, as SambaNova's chairman. In February 2026 SambaNova raised a USD 350 million Series E and unveiled its SN50 inference chip. The company said SN50 would begin shipping in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner, and claimed more than three times the throughput of Nvidia's B200; these are vendor claims rather than independent benchmarks. On 8 July 2026 the company announced a first close of a USD 1 billion Series F at an USD 11 billion post-money valuation, with General Atlantic leading. Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates and Capital Group were named as significant investors, and other participants included BlackRock, Intel Capital, the Qatar Investment Authority and Vista Equity Partners. Liang said further investors were expected to join in a second close. The company said the money would go towards expanding capacity, scaling deployments worldwide and continued investment in chips, systems and software, and towards securing its supply chain for orders over the next 12 months. Earlier coverage put its valuation at about USD 5 billion in 2021, and Intel had reportedly weighed an acquisition at around USD 1.6 billion in late 2025. The company has also been reported to be considering a US listing as early as 2027. Alongside the funding, SambaNova announced that JPMorgan Chase had selected it as an inference-infrastructure partner. The bank will run SN40L and SN50 systems on its own premises for sensitive AI workloads, although some reports cite only the SN40, and a JPMorgan representative described the arrangement in cautious terms, saying the bank looked forward to testing the systems' speed and security. Liang said the choice signals to the banking sector that it is time to stop depending entirely on cloud services. The Qatar Investment Authority's participation gives the company a Gulf sovereign backer at a time when Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are building sovereign compute capacity, and its on-premises, data-sovereignty positioning matches the priorities of regional governments and banks.
Leadership
- Rodrigo Liang, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
- Kunle Olukotun, Co-founder and Chief Technologist
- Christopher Ré, Co-founder
- Rodrigo Liang, Chief Executive
- Lip-Bu Tan, Chairman
- Mohsen Moazami, Vice Chair, Global Strategy and Partnerships
- Matt Padfield, Chief Financial Officer
- Rich Heaton, Executive Vice President, Software