SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation
SambaNova's Series F first close, led by General Atlantic, values the AI chipmaker at $11B and lands alongside a new JPMorganChase inference partnership.
SambaNova Systems closed the first tranche of a $1 billion Series F on July 8, at an $11 billion valuation, led by General Atlantic with participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Capital Group, BlackRock, the Qatar Investment Authority, Intel Capital, and Vista, among others. It’s the company’s second mega-round in five months.
Alongside the raise, SambaNova named JPMorganChase an inference-infrastructure partner, deploying the company’s SN40L and SN50 systems for on-premises inference workloads, a notable win for a chip startup competing against Nvidia’s dominant position in AI training and inference hardware. SambaNova’s next-generation SN50 chip is due to ship in the second half of 2026, with SoftBank lined up as its first deployment partner.
The round reflects a broader pattern this year: enterprises with strict data-residency or latency requirements, banks especially, are willing to pay for dedicated inference hardware rather than routing everything through a cloud API. JPMorganChase’s involvement in particular signals that on-prem inference is moving from pilot to production budget at large financial institutions.
For operators evaluating inference infrastructure vendors beyond the major cloud providers, SambaNova’s back-to-back funding and its financial-services traction are worth tracking, especially if data residency or predictable latency matters more to you than chasing the newest frontier model.