SambaNova Systems has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in the first close of its Series F funding round. General Atlantic led the round, and more investors are expected to join in a second close soon.
"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.
SambaNova Closes $1 Billion Series F
The latest round arrives roughly five months after the Palo Alto, California-based startup launched its SN50 chip and raised a $350 million Series E in February. The company had also been in acquisition talks with Intel, with a deal valuing it at roughly $1.6 billion, according to a December report from Bloomberg News.
When asked whether closing the Series E and F rounds meant SambaNova, founded in 2017, had decided to stay independent, Liang was noncommittal. He said the company continues to field interest. "We're always being approached." The CEO said the door is open to such an exit in this dynamic AI market, but momentum and growth will most likely drive the company toward "being public at some point."
Deepening Intel Partnership
SambaNova's ties to Intel, a backer since its Series C and a participant in this latest round, have grown stronger. Five months ago, the nine-year-old startup 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 take 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 said.
JPMorgan Win Signals Banking Shift
Alongside the new funding, SambaNova revealed that JPMorganChase has selected it as an "inference-infrastructure partner." The bank will use SambaNova's SN40L and SN50 systems to power secure, on-premises AI inference.
"Having JPMorgan Chase decide they're going 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 not to completely depend on cloud services. These banks want heterogeneous [infrastructure]."
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Liang said the JPMorgan win was a signal to the broader market. Banks "of the caliber of JP Morgan" are now building their own private, secure infrastructure to run inference on their most sensitive models, a move he expects will resonate beyond banking. Enterprises and governments are "just starting their AI journey," Liang continued, with most of the growth so far concentrated among tech's model makers and frontier labs, leaving what he called "a huge amount of revenue" still on the table.
Product Evolution and Customer Segments
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 due to begin shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner, Liang noted.
Liang said SambaNova's edge is "premium inference," running the largest models and running them fast. Today's frontier models span trillions of parameters, and he said SambaNova was built specifically to handle them at that scale. The company fits multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack, which helps them run quickly.
SambaNova sees three types of customers. The first is sovereign clouds, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds, a push Liang expects SambaNova to figure centrally in. The second is neoclouds. The third is enterprises building for their own use. In addition to JPMorgan, it also names Saudi Aramco, Intel, and other Japanese firms as customers.
Use of Proceeds and Investor Base
SambaNova will use the proceeds to scale the business and shore up its supply chain against 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 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.