Liquid AI funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Liquid AI builds small, fast AI models that run directly on devices. Its Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) power a search model inside Shopify, a vision model on a Sharp smartphone, and a voice assistant planned for Mercedes-Benz cars, all without sending data to a remote server. The models are built on a different architecture from the transformers behind ChatGPT and Claude, which is the company's main technical bet.

Liquid AI has raised $287.5 million in two announced rounds since it came out of MIT in 2023: a seed closed in two stages and a Series A led by AMD. That Series A, in December 2024, valued the company at more than $2 billion.

The company spent its first two years proving the architecture and the next two selling it to device makers. Let's dive into Liquid AI's funding history.

Liquid AI raised a large seed for a company with no product, then a Series A almost seven times bigger a year later. The seed was led by financial backers betting on the research, and the Series A by a chipmaker betting on where the models would run.

Liquid AI was founded in early 2023 by four researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL): CEO Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, Alexander Amini, and Daniela Rus, who directs CSAIL. Their research, liquid neural networks, began with a study of the nervous system of a tiny worm, C. elegans. The idea was a network whose behavior keeps adapting to new inputs, built from far fewer neurons than a standard model needs.

The seed came together in two stages. The first, led by OSS Capital in 2023, brought in angels such as Naval Ravikant, WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, and GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. Data provider Multiples puts that first stage at about $6 million, a figure the company has not confirmed.

The full seed was announced on December 6, 2023, when Liquid AI came out of stealth. OSS Capital co-led it with PagsGroup, the investment office of Stephen Pagliuca, the Bain Capital veteran and Boston Celtics co-owner. Both firms took board seats, according to the company's SEC filing.

The round also drew corporate investors, which is rare for a seed. Samsung Next, WordPress parent Automattic, and Capgemini's venture arm ISAI Cap Venture invested next to Shopify co-founder Tobias Lütke, Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, Notion co-founder Chris Prucha, and Two Sigma co-founder David Siegel. A month later, Capgemini signed a collaboration to build enterprise AI products with Liquid AI.

The Series A followed the first product. In September 2024, Liquid AI released its first three Liquid Foundation Models: LFM-1B, LFM-3B, and a 40-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model. The company claimed they matched or beat transformer models of the same size while using much less memory, especially on long inputs.

Three months later, AMD led a $250 million Series A. It was a strategic deal from the start: Liquid AI agreed to optimize its models for AMD's GPUs, CPUs, and neural processing units, and to train and deploy on AMD Instinct chips. OSS Capital, PagsGroup, and Duke Capital Partners came back, and Shopify joined as a corporate investor.

Liquid AI has not announced a round since. PitchBook lists an undisclosed early-stage deal dated August 2026, but neither the company nor any major outlet has reported a new financing, and no new SEC filing has appeared.

Liquid AI's valuation rose more than sixfold in a year, on the strength of a product launch rather than revenue. The company has not disclosed a price since.

The seed priced Liquid AI as a research bet. Investors paid for the founders' academic record and a published architecture, since Liquid AI had no product and no customers at the time.

The Series A was a different kind of price. AMD paid for a partner that could make its chips more useful for AI on laptops and phones. Liquid AI and AMD never published the valuation. Bloomberg reported it at more than $2 billion, and data providers place it between $2.28 billion and $2.4 billion.

There is no revenue figure to set against that price. Liquid AI does not disclose sales, and its largest announced contract, with Shopify, is described only as worth millions of dollars.

The Series A made Liquid AI a unicorn about 21 months after its founding, in line with how quickly AI startups reach unicorn status today. The gap to the big model labs remains wide, though. Cohere's enterprise AI funding runs to about $1.7 billion, roughly six times what Liquid AI has raised.

Liquid AI's investors fall into three groups: early backers that funded the research, a chipmaker that led the big round, and companies that went on to buy or distribute the models.

AMD led the Series A through AMD Ventures, its corporate venture arm. The investment came with a technical partnership: Liquid AI tunes its models for AMD hardware, from data center Instinct GPUs to the Ryzen processors in consumer laptops.

The deal gives AMD a reason for developers to pick its chips for on-device AI. In August 2025, Liquid AI extended its developer platform to laptops running AMD Ryzen AI processors. For AMD, whose shareholder base is led by large index funds, a model maker that runs best on its hardware helps it compete with Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm for AI workloads beyond the data center.

OSS Capital, the open-source-focused fund founded by Joseph Jacks, led the first seed stage, co-led the full seed, and returned in the Series A. Jacks sits on Liquid AI's board, according to the company's 2023 SEC filing.

PagsGroup, Stephen Pagliuca's investment office, co-led the seed and also came back for the Series A. Pagliuca joined the board too. The two firms are the only investors to lead a round other than AMD.

Shopify's money came in twice. Co-founder Tobias Lütke invested personally in the seed, and Shopify itself joined the Series A.

The relationship turned commercial in November 2025, when Shopify signed a multi-year licensing deal worth "multi-million dollars," according to Liquid AI. The first model it deployed is a text model for Shopify's search that answers in under 20 milliseconds. Lütke's role on both sides is notable given Shopify's founder-controlled ownership, in which he holds about 40% of the voting power.

Samsung Next, the venture arm of the electronics group, joined the seed. Samsung was among the companies that tested Liquid AI's first models in 2024, though no commercial deal has been announced. The link matters because Samsung is both a phone maker and a chip supplier, and Samsung's sprawling ownership structure spans both businesses.

Automattic, the parent of WordPress.com, and Capgemini's ISAI Cap Venture also invested in the seed. Capgemini went on to sign a deal to build enterprise products on Liquid AI's models.

The seed drew a long list of founders as angels. Tom Preston-Werner co-founded GitHub, which sold to Microsoft for $7.5 billion in stock, as GitHub's path to Microsoft ownership shows. Bob Young co-founded Red Hat, Naval Ravikant co-founded AngelList, and Matt Mullenweg created WordPress.

Duke Capital Partners, Duke University's venture fund, invested in both rounds. Breyer Capital, Bold Capital Partners (Peter Diamandis), Safar Partners, Argean Capital, and Link Ventures founder David Blundin also invested. Thermo Fisher CEO Marc Casper and Two Sigma co-founder David Siegel joined as individuals. Data provider Tracxn counts 23 investors in total.

Liquid AI said the Series A would pay for compute, getting its models ready for devices and private servers, commercial partnerships, and more research across model sizes and data types. The company does not disclose spending or burn. Its release record shows where most of the money has gone.

Most of the spending goes into training new model families. After the first LFMs in 2024, Liquid AI released LFM-7B in January 2025 and Hyena Edge, an experimental model designed for phones, in April 2025. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in July 2025 with open weights.

The LFM2 family then grew in every direction: a vision-language model in September 2025, an audio model in October 2025, and a mixture-of-experts model with 8.3 billion parameters, of which only 1.5 billion are active at a time. In 2026, the company moved to LFM2.5, and in September it released a 3-billion-parameter vision model from that family.

Training models of this size costs far less than frontier work. The largest labs spend tens of billions on compute, as OpenAI's $122 billion round shows, while Liquid AI's models top out at a few billion active parameters. Its compute bill is still the largest cost a $250 million round has to cover.

In July 2025, Liquid AI launched LEAP, a platform that lets developers put its models into iOS and Android apps, and Apollo, a free app that runs the models offline on a phone. The smallest models are about 300 megabytes and run on phones with 4 gigabytes of memory.

The models are free to download and to use commercially for companies with less than $10 million in annual revenue. Larger companies need a paid license. That split uses free downloads to win developers and charges the device makers and enterprises that ship the models at scale.

The rest of the money goes into the engineers who adapt models for each customer. Most of Liquid AI's deals are co-development projects: a vision model for Sharp's AQUOS phones, a drug discovery model with Insilico Medicine, and an in-car assistant for Mercedes-Benz.

Sharp shows how these deals work. It picked a Liquid AI vision-language model for its AQUOS wish4 phone in June 2025 after, by Liquid AI's account, Meta's Llama missed Sharp's speed and memory targets. In August 2026, MacPaw chose Liquid AI to supply on-device inference for its Eney assistant and for developers building apps for its Setapp store.

Headcount has grown to roughly 120 people, according to a July 2026 report. The company also sells abroad through partners, including G42 in the Middle East and Vago Solutions in Germany.

Liquid AI's growth push is aimed at the companies that make devices. In April 2026, Mercedes-Benz signed a multi-year deal to run Liquid AI models in its MBUX system in North America, with the first production cars due in the second half of 2026. In September 2026, Qualcomm presented Liquid AI's agent and context models running on Snapdragon chips, and device makers can license them. Qualcomm is a partner but not a shareholder, and its index-fund-heavy cap table, laid out in how Qualcomm is owned, looks much like AMD's.

The product is moving from single models to agents that run entirely on a device, and into new categories such as smart glasses, education, and drug discovery. The company has no public IPO plans, and its last priced round was almost two years ago. The next raise will likely depend on whether the Shopify, Mercedes, and Qualcomm deals turn into revenue the company is willing to disclose.

The main risk is competition from free models. Google's Gemma, Meta's Llama, Alibaba's Qwen, and Microsoft's Phi are all small, open, and improving quickly, and Liquid AI's benchmarks are aimed squarely at them. Its non-transformer architecture is the edge, and it only pays off if device makers believe speed and memory savings are worth a license fee.

Liquid AI has raised $287.5 million across two announced rounds. That includes a $37.5 million seed closed in two stages in 2023 and a $250 million Series A led by AMD in December 2024. The company has not reported any debt. Some databases list totals of $293 million to $297 million, because they count the seed differently.

Liquid AI's lead investors are AMD Ventures, OSS Capital, and PagsGroup. Other backers include Shopify, Samsung Next, Duke Capital Partners, Breyer Capital, Automattic, Capgemini's ISAI Cap Venture, Bold Capital Partners, and Safar Partners, plus angels such as Tobias Lütke, Tom Preston-Werner, Naval Ravikant, and Bob Young.

Liquid AI was valued at more than $2 billion in its December 2024 Series A, with some reports putting the figure at about $2.3 billion. That is up from $303 million after the 2023 seed. The company has not disclosed a valuation since.

No. Liquid AI is private and has not filed for an IPO. Its shares are not traded on any stock exchange.

Liquid AI is owned by its founders, employees, and investors. Co-founder Ramin Hasani is CEO, and co-founders Mathias Lechner and Daniela Rus sit on the board. The largest outside holders are likely AMD, which led the $250 million Series A, and OSS Capital and PagsGroup, which co-led the seed and hold board seats, though exact stakes are not public.