SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation, Series F close

SambaNova Systems has closed a first tranche of a Series F round, raising $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic, and expects a second close as more investors join, CEO and co-founder Rodrigo Liang said. The round follows the company’s February unveiling of its SN50 chip and a $350 million Series E.

What did SambaNova announce?

SambaNova announced a $1 billion first close of its Series F at an $11 billion valuation, with General Atlantic as lead and a second close expected in the coming weeks, Liang said. The latest financing comes roughly five months after the company unveiled its SN50 chip alongside a $350 million Series E in February, and follows prior acquisition interest from Intel that Bloomberg said valued SambaNova at roughly $1.6 billion.

The company said Intel, a backer since SambaNova’s Series C, participated in the new round. Liang declined to commit to a long-term independence strategy, saying the company continues to receive approaches and that momentum and growth make going public more likely in the future.

Who invested and how will SambaNova use the money?

General Atlantic led the first close, with Intel participating and other named investors including Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group, plus new and existing backers such as A&E Investment, Assam Ventures, Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, Kabila Capital, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Vista Equity Partners, and Volantis. Liang said the company will use the proceeds to scale the business and to secure its supply chain against a wave of demand, describing supply-chain funding as essential to fulfilling orders and buying required materials over the next 12 months.

SambaNova also announced a commercial win: JPMorgan Chase selected SambaNova as an "inference-infrastructure partner," deploying SN40L and SN50 systems for secure, on-premises AI inference. Liang called the JPMorgan deal "a big deal," arguing banks and other enterprises are beginning to build private, secure infrastructure and seek heterogeneous setups rather than relying entirely on cloud providers.

How does SambaNova’s technology and product timeline look?

SambaNova positions itself for "premium inference" and to run very large models quickly by fitting multi-trillion-parameter models onto a single rack. The company launched the SN40L in September 2023, made it available on-premises in November 2023, and unveiled the next-generation SN50 in February 2026; the SN50 is due to begin shipping to customers in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank named as its first deployment partner.

SambaNova identifies three customer segments: sovereign clouds funded by governments, neoclouds, and enterprises building private infrastructure. In addition to JPMorgan, the company lists Saudi Aramco, Intel, and several Japanese firms among its customers.

Why it matters

The round and the JPMorgan deployment illustrate a shift toward specialized, on-premises inference capacity for sensitive enterprise workloads, rather than exclusive reliance on public cloud. SambaNova’s focus on fitting very large models into single racks and shipping the SN50 in the second half of 2026 positions it to serve customers demanding low-latency, private inference for frontier-scale models, while the capital raise aims to secure supply lines needed to meet that demand.

What to watch

Watch whether the Series F second close completes and which additional investors join, and monitor SN50 deliveries in the second half of 2026 to SoftBank and other early partners. Also track adoption beyond financial services: SambaNova is pitching sovereign clouds and neoclouds as growth markets, and a steady stream of large, on-prem deployments would confirm that enterprise demand for private inference is scaling.