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

Tenstorrent designs AI chips and the computers built around them. Its Wormhole and Blackhole processors run AI models in servers it sells as Galaxy systems, and its Ascalon CPU designs, based on the open RISC-V instruction set, are licensed to other chipmakers. Jim Keller, the engineer behind landmark chips at AMD, Apple, and Tesla, runs the company as CEO.

Tenstorrent has raised about $2.3 billion across seven funding events since it was founded in Toronto in 2016. More than half of it arrived in a single Series E that closed in August 2026.

The investor list mixes venture firms with industrial companies. Samsung, Hyundai, and LG all hold stakes, and each also buys or licenses Tenstorrent's technology. Let's dive into Tenstorrent's funding history.

Tenstorrent spent its first five years as a quiet Canadian startup, then raised most of its money after Jim Keller took charge. The rounds also changed shape, from venture checks to strategic money from manufacturers to a Series E with 134 investors.

Ljubisa Bajic, Ivan Hamer, and Milos Trajkovic founded Tenstorrent in Toronto in 2016. Bajic had worked on chip design at AMD and Nvidia. The idea was a processor built from small, programmable cores called Tensix, which could skip work an AI model did not need instead of grinding through every calculation.

Real Ventures, a Montreal firm, backed the seed, and Eclipse Ventures, a Silicon Valley fund that invests in hardware, joined soon after. By the time Tenstorrent came out of stealth in April 2020, it had raised about $34 million, most of it from the Series B in 2019. Partners from both firms still sit on its board.

The company unveiled its first chip, Grayskull, in 2020. Jim Keller joined as chief technology officer and president in January 2021, after leaving Intel. He had been one of Tenstorrent's early backers.

The Series C was the first time Tenstorrent raised serious money. Fidelity led it in May 2021, four months after Keller arrived, and the round made Tenstorrent a unicorn.

Tenstorrent said the money would go into its next chips and into hiring. It was also the round that put Keller's name at the center of the pitch. His record at AMD, where he led the design of the Zen cores, and at Apple and Tesla gave investors a reason to back a small team against Nvidia.

Keller replaced Bajic as CEO in January 2023. The company then turned to industrial investors that wanted chips of their own. In August 2023, Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung's Catalyst Fund co-led a convertible note, which Tenstorrent described as an up-round. Hyundai put in $30 million and Kia $20 million.

The note was built to convert into shares in a later priced round, so it set no new valuation. Two months later, Tenstorrent picked Samsung Foundry to manufacture its next AI chiplets on a 4-nanometer process.

The Series D in December 2024 was the largest round to that point. Samsung Securities and AFW Partners, a Korean firm focused on mobility, co-led it, and Bezos Expeditions, Baillie Gifford, and LG Technology Ventures joined. Export Development Canada and HOOPP, an Ontario pension plan, kept a Canadian presence on a cap table that had shifted south. Tenstorrent had moved its headquarters to Santa Clara in November 2023.

The Information reported in November 2025 that Tenstorrent was in talks to raise at least $800 million, led by Fidelity. No round was announced that winter. In May 2026, Bloomberg reported that Intel and Qualcomm had shown early interest in buying the company.

The money arrived instead as a Series E. It appears in a Form D that Tenstorrent Holdings filed with the SEC on September 9, 2026, with sales starting on August 26. The offering was set at $1.42 billion, and about $129 million of it was still unsold. Tenstorrent has not announced the round or named its leads.

Tenstorrent has set only two valuations of its own, in the Series C and the Series D. Everything since comes from press reports, takeover talks, and private-market data.

The value grew about 2.7 times between the two announced rounds. That is slow for an AI chip company over three and a half years, a period in which Nvidia's market value multiplied many times over. Tenstorrent spent much of it rebuilding its chip roadmap around chiplets and RISC-V, with little revenue to show for it.

Some outlets put the Series D at $2.6 billion rather than $2.7 billion. The gap comes from rounding the $693 million on top of the $2 billion pre-money figure.

The Series E roughly doubled the Series D valuation, if the data providers are right. Forge Global lists $5.76 billion and PM Insights $6.41 billion, and neither figure has been confirmed by the company. Both sit below the price The Information said Qualcomm discussed in June. Keller said at the end of June that no talks with Qualcomm were taking place, and a useful contrast is Qualcomm's widely held ownership, which makes it a buyer that answers to public shareholders on any large deal.

Tenstorrent has no "Who owns" page of its own yet. The closest comparison is Groq's funding history, another inference chip startup that ended up licensing its technology to Nvidia.

Tenstorrent's investors fall into three groups. Venture firms backed the founding team, manufacturers bought in to secure chips and designs, and large funds arrived once the company looked like a contender.

Samsung is Tenstorrent's deepest partner. Its Catalyst Fund co-led the 2023 note, and Samsung Securities, the group's brokerage, co-led the Series D. Samsung Foundry makes Tenstorrent's chiplets, and Samsung licenses its Ascalon CPU and Tensix AI designs.

That makes Samsung a shareholder, a supplier, and a customer at once. For a group whose foundry trails TSMC, a chip designer that commits to Samsung's process is worth backing, and Samsung's ownership structure shows how many affiliates can take a piece of a deal like this.

Hyundai Motor Group co-led the 2023 note and joined the Series D. Hyundai said it wanted "optimized but differentiated" chip technology, rather than buying the same parts as every other carmaker. The group's chip work with Tenstorrent centers on AI for future vehicles.

LG Technology Ventures joined the Series D. LG started working with Tenstorrent in 2023 on AI and RISC-V chiplets for smart TVs, then expanded the deal in November 2024 to chips for appliances, cars, and data-center video. A conglomerate controlled through a family holding company, as LG's ownership chain shows, LG is also a licensee of Tenstorrent's designs.

Fidelity is the longest-running large investor. It led the 2021 round, joined the 2023 note through Fidelity Ventures, came back for the Series D, and was reported as the lead of the talks in late 2025. AFW Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Baillie Gifford, XTX Markets, and Maverick Capital make up most of the remaining financial investors.

Jeff Bezos's personal investment firm joined in 2024. None of these investors has disclosed its stake.

Real Ventures and Eclipse Ventures have been in since the start. Both have partners on Tenstorrent's board, according to the Series E filing, which also lists co-founder Milos Trajkovic and chief operating officer Keith Witek as directors.

Tenstorrent spends its capital on chip design, software, and a growing fleet of servers. The Series D was earmarked for open-source software, developer hiring, new design centers, and "systems and clouds for AI developers," and the company has followed that list closely.

Each new chip generation costs Tenstorrent a tapeout, the expensive step of sending a finished design to a factory. Blackhole, the second generation of its AI processor, launched in spring 2025. The third generation is built from chiplets, small dies joined in one package, and its tapeout slipped from late 2025 into early 2026.

The CPU side runs on the same budget. The Ascalon family grew to four designs by mid-2026, and Tenstorrent has synthesized part of its CPU on the 2-nanometer process of Rapidus, Japan's new national foundry.

Software is the largest single cost and the hardest problem. Nvidia's lead rests on CUDA as much as on its chips, which is why Nvidia's high-margin chip business has proven so hard to dent. Tenstorrent's answer is an open-source stack, TT-Metalium and the TT-Forge compiler, that anyone can read and change. Keller said in 2025 that hundreds of engineers work on Forge alone.

Headcount grew from about 550 in late 2023 to more than 1,000. In December 2025, Tenstorrent cut about 7.5% of its staff and shifted sales away from large enterprises toward individual developers and smaller companies. Keller said the cuts were not made for financial reasons.

In July 2025, Tenstorrent bought Blue Cheetah Analog Design, which makes the interconnects that let chiplets talk to each other. The price was not disclosed. Keller later tied part of the chiplet delay to integrating the team.

The newest cost is hardware Tenstorrent builds and sells itself. The company runs an AI data center in Osaka and was building 1,000 Galaxy servers in mid-2026, more than half of them already sold. Its largest deployment is with ai&, a Japanese AI cloud co-founded by Tenstorrent's former chief customer officer, which runs more than 120 Galaxy systems.

Tenstorrent sells three things: Galaxy servers and cards, licenses to its CPU and AI designs, and developer hardware starting at $999. It does not disclose revenue. In December 2024, the company said it had closed about $150 million in deals.

Japan is also a paying customer. In November 2024, Reuters reported a $50 million government contract, shared with Japan's chip research center LSTC, to train up to 200 Japanese chip designers at Tenstorrent's US offices.

Tenstorrent's growth push is aimed at sovereign AI, countries that want computing power they control. Japan is the anchor market, through ai& and the Rapidus work, and the company has added deals in the United Arab Emirates and Europe. It is also pitching its RISC-V CPU designs to hyperscalers that want to cut their reliance on Arm and x86, the chip designs behind most server processors. The Series E gives it the cash to ship Galaxy clusters at scale, and its largest order so far is a 96-system cluster headed outside the US.

The product plan rests on the chiplet generation reaching customers on time, and on the software catching up with the hardware. About 70 models ran on Blackhole by December 2025, against a goal of 100. A company that has competed with Nvidia since 2016 still has to win developers one model at a time, while Cerebras's post-IPO ownership shows a rival chip startup that has already reached public markets.

Keller said in June 2026 that Tenstorrent is aiming for an IPO, while leaving room for a strategic deal. The main risks are execution, customer concentration in ai&, and export controls, which force Tenstorrent to strip features from Blackhole and Ascalon for China. The takeover interest from Qualcomm and from Intel, which is trying to rebuild its own processor business, shows how a buyer might value the company if the IPO window closes.

Tenstorrent has raised about $2.3 billion across seven funding events. That includes about $34 million in early rounds through 2019, a Series C of over $200 million in 2021, a $100 million convertible note in 2023, a $693 million Series D in 2024, and a Series E of about $1.29 billion in August 2026. Part of the 2023 note may have converted into the Series D, so the true new money could be slightly lower.

Tenstorrent's lead investors include Fidelity, Samsung Securities, AFW Partners, Hyundai Motor Group, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. Other backers include LG Technology Ventures, Kia, Bezos Expeditions, Baillie Gifford, XTX Markets, Export Development Canada, HOOPP, Maverick Capital, EPIQ Capital, Eclipse Ventures, and Real Ventures.

Tenstorrent has not announced a valuation since its December 2024 Series D, which set a $2 billion pre-money value, or about $2.7 billion after the new money. Private-market data providers estimate the August 2026 Series E valued it at $5.8 billion to $6.4 billion.

No. Tenstorrent is private and has not filed for an IPO. Its shares are not traded on any stock exchange, though CEO Jim Keller has said the company is aiming to go public.

Tenstorrent is owned by its founders, employees, and investors. Jim Keller is CEO and a shareholder. The largest outside holders are likely Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Fidelity, and AFW Partners, which led its biggest rounds, along with founding backers Eclipse Ventures and Real Ventures, though exact stakes are not public.