SambaNova funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

SambaNova Systems designs its own AI chips and sells the computing power they produce. Its processors, which it calls reconfigurable dataflow units (RDUs), run large language models for customers through a pay-per-token cloud, dedicated racks in a customer's own data center, or a turnkey package for telecom and cloud operators.

SambaNova has raised about $2.5 billion across six priced rounds since 2018, all of it equity. Its latest, the first close of a $1 billion Series F led by General Atlantic in July 2026, valued the company at $11 billion.

The path to that number was not a straight line. SambaNova was a $5 billion unicorn in 2021, explored a sale in 2025, and signed a non-binding term sheet with Intel before talks stalled. Let's dive into SambaNova's funding history.

SambaNova raised more than $1.1 billion in its first four years, then went nearly five years without a new priced round. The two rounds of 2026 more than doubled its total.

SambaNova came out of Stanford. Co-founders Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré are Stanford computer science professors, and CEO Rodrigo Liang previously ran processor engineering at Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Their idea was a chip whose circuits rearrange themselves around the flow of data in a neural network, instead of a general-purpose GPU running AI as one workload among many.

Lip-Bu Tan, the chip industry investor behind Walden International, became chairman at founding, after a small seed round reported at about $2 million. Walden and GV, Alphabet's venture arm, co-led the Series A in March 2018. Intel Capital led the Series B a year later, the first sign of a relationship with Intel that would shape the company's next seven years.

BlackRock led the Series C in February 2020, as SambaNova began shipping DataScale, a rack-scale system that customers installed in their own data centers. Early buyers included US national laboratories that needed to train scientific models outside the public cloud.

SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 led the Series D in April 2021, at the height of the venture boom in AI chips. Singapore's sovereign investors Temasek and GIC joined, and every major existing backer returned. The round took total funding past $1 billion and priced the company above $5 billion.

The money paid for a business built around selling hardware for model training. That market turned against SambaNova once Nvidia's GPUs became the default for training and the largest buyers began building their own chips.

By 2025 SambaNova needed a new strategy and new money. It cut 77 jobs in April 2025, about 15% of its staff, and moved its focus from training to inference, the work of running models once they are built. In October 2025 it hired bankers to explore a sale after struggling to raise.

Intel became the likely buyer. Reports of talks surfaced in late October, and Bloomberg reported in December 2025 that the two companies were close to a deal worth about $1.6 billion including debt, and Reuters reported a non-binding term sheet. Tan, by then Intel's CEO as well as SambaNova's chairman, recused himself. In January 2026 the talks stalled and SambaNova went back to investors instead.

Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital led the Series E in February 2026, announced alongside SN50, the company's fifth-generation chip, and a multi-year partnership with Intel. Intel put in $35 million, then agreed in April to add $15 million more, which took its stake to about 9%.

Investor demand changed quickly after that. In July 2026 General Atlantic led a $1 billion first close of the Series F, with Capital Group, T. Rowe Price, and the Qatar Investment Authority among the buyers. Liang said a second close would follow, and none had been announced by early October 2026.

SambaNova's valuation has moved in both directions, which is rare among the AI companies in this series. It more than halved between 2021 and early 2026, then rose about fivefold in less than five months.

The Series D roughly doubled the Series C price. For four years after that, no new round tested the number, and the first public signal was a markdown: in late 2025, BlackRock cut the value of its SambaNova shares, implying a valuation under half the SoftBank price.

The Intel talks priced the company lower still. The Series E was a down round, and SambaNova did not disclose the valuation. The Information reported it at about $2 billion, which would leave every Series D investor sitting on a paper loss.

The Series F reset the picture. At $11 billion, SambaNova was valued at more than four times the capital it had raised, and at more than twice its 2021 peak. Two things changed in between: SN50 gave it a new chip to sell, and investors began paying up for inference hardware after Nvidia's roughly $20 billion licensing deal for Groq's inference technology and the Cerebras listing in May 2026.

Secondary markets have been less generous. Reports in September 2026 put SambaNova shares on trading platforms well below the Series F price, though those trades are thin and the prices are unverified. A business valuation calculator shows how much of a price like $11 billion rests on growth that has yet to arrive.

SambaNova's investors fall into three groups: the venture firms that backed it at the start, the growth and sovereign funds that led the large rounds, and Intel, which has been an investor, a partner, a near-buyer, and now a sales channel.

Lip-Bu Tan has chaired SambaNova since 2017, and Walden International, the firm he founded, co-led the Series A. Tan is one of the best-connected investors in semiconductors, and he was Cadence Design Systems' CEO for most of SambaNova's early life.

His role became more complicated in March 2025, when he took over as Intel's CEO. Reuters reported that Tan had pushed Intel to back SambaNova and that his funds stood to lose money if it failed. Intel says he recuses himself from decisions where he has a conflict.

Intel Capital led the Series B and joined the Series C, Series D, Series E, and Series F. Its stake rose from 6.8% in 2025 to about 9% after the 2026 investments, which cleared US antitrust review in May 2026.

The bigger tie is commercial. Under the 2026 partnership, Intel sells SambaNova systems alongside its Xeon processors, and the two are building a combined system with GPUs, Xeon 6, and SN50 chips. For a company trying to rebuild its own chip business, SambaNova gives Intel an AI accelerator story it has struggled to tell with its own products.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the Series D and is likely one of the largest outside holders, though its stake has not been disclosed. The investment fits a fund that spread money across dozens of AI and chip bets in 2021, and it sits inside a group whose control rests with SoftBank's founder-led ownership under Masayoshi Son. SoftBank Corp., the group's Japanese telecom arm, is now also a customer.

BlackRock led the Series C and returned in the Series D, Series E, and Series F. Temasek and GIC entered in the Series D. None of them have disclosed stakes or board seats.

Vista Equity Partners, a software-focused private equity firm, co-led the Series E with Cambium Capital. Vista is also working with SambaNova on an AI cloud venture that combines Intel processors, SambaNova chips, and Nvidia GPUs.

General Atlantic led the Series F. Its round brought in mutual fund managers Capital Group and T. Rowe Price, the kind of investors that often appear one or two rounds before an IPO. Seligman Ventures invested in both 2026 rounds and holds a board observer seat. Sovereign money came from the Qatar Investment Authority, which has backed several US AI companies.

Corporate investors now supply a large share of AI startup funding, and SambaNova's cap table shows why: Intel and SoftBank each invested, buy or sell its products, and gain a supplier that is not Nvidia.

SambaNova spends its funding on three things: chips, capacity, and the shift from selling hardware to selling inference. Each 2026 round named the same priorities.

The largest cost is chip development. Each new generation requires a full design cycle and a production run at TSMC, and each one has to ship before rivals move to a newer process. The SN40L, launched in 2023, has 102 billion transistors and three tiers of memory. SN50, unveiled in February 2026 and shipping in the second half of the year, is the chip the Series E and Series F are paying to produce.

Supply is now as big a concern as design. Liang said part of the Series F would go to securing materials, including high-bandwidth memory, for the next 12 months. On raw specifications SN50 still trails Nvidia's flagship GPUs on memory capacity and bandwidth, so SambaNova competes on speed and power per token rather than peak performance.

SambaNova launched its cloud service in September 2024, and the 2025 layoffs completed the move away from training. It now sells through three products: SambaCloud, which charges per token for open models such as Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek; SambaStack, dedicated systems for a single customer; and SambaManaged, a package that lets operators stand up an inference cloud in about 90 days.

That model makes SambaNova a competitor to Nvidia's data center business in one part of the market and a partner in another. SambaNova now pitches its chips as the fast "decode" stage of inference, generating output tokens, next to GPUs that handle the rest.

The Series F was earmarked for deployments with enterprises, sovereign customers, and neoclouds, the newer cloud providers built around AI computing, the same market that has drawn heavy investment into Crusoe's AI data centers. Customers named publicly include JPMorganChase, SoftBank Corp., Saudi Aramco, OVHcloud, and regional clouds in Australia, Germany, and the UK.

Saudi Arabia is a large bet. In February 2025 SambaNova committed $140 million of investment in the kingdom, tied to a sovereign language model service with the telecom operator STC. SambaNova does not publish revenue or burn, and outside estimates of its 2025 revenue are unsourced.

SambaNova's growth push targets three customer groups: sovereign clouds, neoclouds, and large enterprises that want to run AI on their own premises. Japan and the Gulf are its most visible new markets, through SoftBank Corp., a distribution deal with TEPCO Systems, and its Saudi commitments. Intel's sales force gives it a channel into enterprise data centers it could not reach alone.

The product plan centers on getting SN50 into volume production and building combined systems with Intel and with Nvidia GPUs. Liang has said the company is strongly considering a US IPO in 2027, which would follow Cerebras's ownership after its IPO as a public test of how investors value a non-Nvidia AI chipmaker.

The risks are concentrated. SambaNova depends on scarce memory supply, on Intel's willingness to sell its systems, and on a chairman who also runs its largest strategic partner. It also has to win customers away from Nvidia's software ecosystem. The $1 billion Series F buys the chips and capacity for that test, and the second close and an IPO filing will show whether the $11 billion price holds.

SambaNova has raised about $2.5 billion. That includes six priced rounds, from a $56 million Series A in 2018 to a $1 billion Series F first close in July 2026, plus a $15 million add-on from Intel in 2026. The company has not reported any debt.

SambaNova's lead investors are General Atlantic, Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, BlackRock, Intel Capital, Walden International, and GV. Other backers include Temasek, GIC, Capital Group, T. Rowe Price, the Qatar Investment Authority, Seligman Ventures, Battery Ventures, and Mayfield.

SambaNova was valued at $11 billion in its July 2026 Series F. That is up from a reported $2 billion in the February 2026 Series E and about $5.1 billion in the 2021 Series D.

No. SambaNova is private and has not filed for an IPO. CEO Rodrigo Liang has said the company is considering a US listing in 2027. Intel discussed buying the company in late 2025, but the talks stalled without a deal.

SambaNova is owned by its founders, employees, and investors. Rodrigo Liang is co-founder and CEO, and Lip-Bu Tan is chairman. Intel holds about 9%, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, BlackRock, General Atlantic, and Vista are among the other large holders, though their exact stakes are not public.