SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation in Series F first close

SambaNova closes $1B at $11B valuation, first leg of Series F

SambaNova Systems has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in the first close of a Series F funding round led by General Atlantic, according to reporting from TechCrunch and Bloomberg published on July 8, 2026. The Palo Alto-based AI chipmaker said more investors are expected to join a second close in the coming weeks.

“In the next few weeks, a few more investors will be coming in, and the second close is likely to finish up,” CEO and co-founder Rodrigo Liang told TechCrunch. Bloomberg, which also reported the deal, said the company is set to formally announce the round on Wednesday, July 8.

The round comes only about five months after the company closed a $350 million Series E in February, the same month it unveiled its second-generation SN50 chip. Investors named as participating in the Series F first close include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital Group, A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Vista Equity Partners and Volantis, alongside existing backer Intel.

JPMorgan, SoftBank and the SN50 roadmap

Alongside the financing, SambaNova disclosed it 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 relationship a signal to the wider financial sector. “Having JPMorgan Chase decide they’re going to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal,” he told TechCrunch. “It sends a message to the banking industry that it’s time not to completely depend on cloud services.”

The company also confirmed SoftBank as the first commercial deployment partner for the SN50, which is due to begin shipping in the second half of 2026. Earlier-generation SN40L systems have been available in the cloud since September 2023 and on-premises since November 2023.

Liang said proceeds would be used to scale the business and shore up supply chains. “We’re using that capital to secure the supply chain,” he said, adding that the funding is essential to fulfilling orders and procuring materials for delivery over the next 12 months.

Why the new valuation matters

The $11 billion figure is more than six times the roughly $1.6 billion valuation Bloomberg reported in December 2025 when SambaNova was in acquisition discussions with Intel. That gap, from a potential acquirer price to a Series F in five months, points to how dramatically investor sentiment toward specialised AI silicon has shifted. The round also dwarfs the earlier $350 million Series E announced in February.

Liang declined to characterise the new capital as a verdict on SambaNova’s independence. Asked whether the back-to-back rounds settled the question, he was noncommittal, telling TechCrunch: “We’re always being approached.” He left the door open to an exit, but said momentum and growth would more likely carry the company toward “being public at some point.”

How SambaNova positions itself

Liang framed SambaNova’s edge as “premium inference” — running the largest frontier models quickly on-premises rather than in the public cloud. He said SambaNova fits multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack, a design the company says is built for the scale of today’s frontier systems, which span trillions of parameters.

SambaNova breaks its customer base into three groups: sovereign clouds funded by governments to build private infrastructure; neoclouds; and enterprises running their own deployments. Beyond JPMorgan, Liang named Saudi Aramco, Intel and Japanese firms as customers. He said most AI revenue to date has gone to the model makers and frontier labs, leaving what he called “a huge amount of revenue” to be captured as enterprises and governments “are just starting their AI journey.”

Where the reporting lines up

TechCrunch and Bloomberg, the two outlets reporting the financing directly, agree on the headline numbers: $1 billion raised at an $11 billion valuation, in a Series F first close led by General Atlantic, with additional investors to follow. Both confirm Intel’s participation. They diverge only in format: TechCrunch carries Liang’s direct quotes and the JPMorgan and SoftBank customer details, while Bloomberg frames the deal as a marker of “investors’ conviction in rising demand for infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence.”

One detail noted only in TechCrunch is the December Bloomberg report that SambaNova had been in acquisition talks with Intel at a roughly $1.6 billion valuation. That figure was not repeated in the current funding reports and should be treated as historical context rather than a contemporaneous valuation.

The bigger picture: where SambaNova sits in the AI chip race

SambaNova is one of a small group of independent AI accelerator companies trying to carve out territory outside Nvidia’s near-monopoly on AI training and inference silicon. The scale of the round is the most concrete data point published about investor appetite for that thesis in mid-2026. By comparison, the only previously disclosed round on file at TechCrunch was the $350 million Series E in February and earlier deals that took the company through Series C with Intel participating. A jump to $11 billion in five months suggests investors are pricing in revenue or deployment commitments that have not been publicly broken out.

The France 24 / AFP dispatch filed the same day about the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 model suite and the broader US-AI policy backdrop provides indirect context: with frontier model releases expanding into 2026 and the US government drawing up rules for which AI models fall under new security restrictions, demand for hardened, on-premises inference infrastructure is being framed by vendors as a structural pull, not a cyclical one.

Stakeholders and competing bets

The investors in the round are split between traditional growth and venture managers (General Atlantic, T. Rowe Price, Capital Group, BlackRock, Vista Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital), Gulf and regional sovereign or quasi-sovereign capital (Qatar Investment Authority), and strategic investors with operating interests (Intel, SoftBank as deployment partner). That mix gives SambaNova both working capital and potential customer or distribution leverage.

The clearest counterweight to SambaNova’s positioning is the dominant position of Nvidia, whose GPUs still underpin most cloud AI workloads. Liang’s argument — that regulated enterprises and governments will choose private, heterogeneous inference on their own hardware rather than depend on a single US cloud vendor — is one that competing AI chip startups, including Cerebras, Groq and a handful of others, are also making. SambaNova’s JPMorgan win is the most prominent reference customer cited to date, but the financial terms of that relationship have not been disclosed.

What to watch next

Three concrete milestones will determine whether the $11 billion valuation holds up. First, the second close of the Series F in the coming weeks, and whether it materially expands the round size or pushes the valuation higher. Second, SN50 shipments to SoftBank, and then other named customers including JPMorgan, in the second half of 2026. Third, whether Intel deepens its co-development arrangement with SambaNova — the companies said in February they would co-develop products and take them to market — and whether Intel’s participation triggers any further equity, supply or M&A discussions.

Separately, Liang’s own framing of an eventual public listing versus a continuing role for Intel as investor and partner will be a live question. A filing, a renewed acquisition approach, or a flat outcome would each move the story; for now the company is funded and growing, and is publicly saying both an exit and an IPO are possible.