US-based Positron AI has raised $875m in a Series C financing round, bringing the company’s post-money valuation to $5bn.
The AI hardware firm is developing products aimed at making AI inference more cost effective and energy efficient.
The latest funding round saw participation from NEA, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, Dylan Patel’s SemiAnalysis Capital, Andra Capital, and Jim Clark, who is known for founding Silicon Graphics and Netscape.
As a result of the investment, Forest Baskett from NEA, Thomas Jermoluk from Jim Clark Office, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, and Dylan Patel will take seats on the Positron board of directors.
The Series C financing occurred in two tranches. The first, amounting to $375m at a $3.5bn pre-money valuation, was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Andra Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Dylan Patel’s SemiAnalysis Capital.
The subsequent Series C-1, providing up to $500m, was led by NEA and Jim Clark.
Further support came from DFJ Growth, Resilience Reserve, Qatar Investment Authority, Arena Private Wealth, Helena, Natural Capital, 1517 Fund, Unless, Flume Ventures, Boardman Bay Capital Management, Banyan Ventures, Fincadia Advisors, and U First Capital.
Strategic investors included VentureTech Alliance, Cisco Investments, Hudson River Trading, and Naver Ventures.
The funds are intended to support several projects, including the completion of the Asimov silicon tapeout and the development of a 2MW+ engineering data centre and emulation platform. They will also be used for the ramp-up of Titan, Positron’s next-generation inference system.
Asimov is scheduled to be taped out using TSMC N3P technology by the end of 2026, with production expected in the second half of 2027.
The chip will feature between 288GB and 2,304GB of memory. Titan, which integrates up to eight Asimov chips, is being prepared for models with more than 16 trillion parameters.
Currently, Positron’s Atlas system is deployed in more than 50 racks at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Partners such as Parasail, Jump Trading, and i3d.net are among its customers.
Positron AI CEO Mitesh Agrawal said: “Speed matters in this market, both in how quickly we ship new generations of silicon and in how quickly they reach customers. Deploying Atlas at scale taught us an enormous amount about what inference customers actually need, and we have carried those lessons directly into Asimov and Titan. Our focus now is to tape out Asimov, bring Titan to production, and scale manufacturing to meet the demand in front of us. This financing gives us the resources to do exactly that.”