SambaNova closes USD $1 billion round at USD $11bn

SambaNova has completed the first close of a USD $1 billion Series F funding round, valuing the artificial intelligence infrastructure company at USD $11 billion.

General Atlantic led the round, with backing from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates and Capital Group. Other new and existing investors include A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Intel Capital, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Vista Equity Partners and Volantis.

The fundraising was announced alongside a new commercial deployment with JPMorganChase. The bank has selected SambaNova as an inference infrastructure partner and plans to deploy its SN40 and SN50 systems for secure, on-premise AI inference.

The twin announcements come as companies focus more on the systems needed to run AI applications in live environments, rather than only on training large models. That shift has pushed inference infrastructure higher up the agenda for businesses seeking tighter control over performance, power use and data location.

SambaNova will use the new capital to expand capacity, develop products and increase deployments across enterprises, sovereign AI projects, neo-cloud providers and service providers. It also plans to keep investing in chips, systems, software and broader AI infrastructure.

Rodrigo Liang, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SambaNova, framed the financing around inference's growing role in corporate AI spending. "SambaNova's $11 billion valuation highlights the central role that fast inference now plays in the enterprise AI stack," he said.

General Atlantic tied its investment to what it sees as a widening gap between demand for inference and available supply.

"SambaNova's platform is differentiated, built for a market where inference has become foundational to enterprise and industry transformation," said Martín Escobari, Co-President and Head of Global Growth Equity at General Atlantic. "Rodrigo and the team are driving deep technical innovation to achieve growing commercial momentum while demand for inference is accelerating well ahead of supply. We are pleased to lead this round to support SambaNova in shaping the next generation of AI infrastructure."

Seligman Ventures also cited the shift from model training to production deployment as a reason for backing the company.

"We're excited to partner with Rodrigo and the SambaNova team as they build a category-defining AI infrastructure platform at a moment when enterprise AI is shifting from training to production deployment," said Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures and Board Observer at SambaNova. "As AI moves into production, lowering cost per token while maintaining performance and efficiency will be critical for enterprise adoption. SambaNova's purpose-built RDU architecture is uniquely positioned to address that challenge at scale."

For JPMorganChase, the agreement centres on using on-premise systems rather than relying solely on external cloud infrastructure. Large banks and other regulated groups have been weighing how to adopt generative AI while keeping sensitive workloads inside controlled environments.

Against that backdrop, the bank outlined the standards it expects from systems used for internal AI workloads.

"At JPMorganChase, AI infrastructure has to meet a very high bar for performance, control and reliability," said Darrin Alves, CIO, Infrastructure Platforms, JPMorganChase. "We're excited to deploy SambaNova's RDU architecture and look forward to testing its speed and security for on-prem inference in our demanding enterprise AI workloads."

SambaNova has been building on earlier financing and product announcements. It has already raised more than USD $350 million this year alongside a strategic collaboration with Intel, and recently introduced its SN50 chip while expanding work on heterogeneous inference.

The latest funding round suggests investors still see room for specialist AI hardware and systems suppliers despite intense competition across the sector. It also points to continued appetite for companies focused on inference, which has become more prominent as customers move from pilot projects to day-to-day use of AI tools.

SambaNova was founded in 2017 and is based in San Jose, California.