AI chip startup Positron's valuation skyrockets in latest funding round

Sept 10 : Positron AI, a startup developing chips to run AI models, said on Thursday it has raised $875 million in its latest funding round, more than quadrupling its valuation in seven months to $5 billion.

The startup had raised $230 million in February at a valuation of $1.06 billion, according to data provider PitchBook.

Here are some details:

• The rapidly growing AI inference market, focused on running trained AI models, has become a key battleground as companies develop specialized processors to challenge Nvidia's dominance.

• The financing was split into two tranches: a $375 million Series C at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation and a Series C-1 of up to $500 million led by NEA and Jim Clark, Positron said.

• Proceeds will fund the final design stage of Asimov, the company's next-generation chip. The company targets production in the second half of 2027.

• The company said its AI inference system, Titan, will combine four to eight Asimov chips to serve models exceeding 16 trillion parameters and context windows beyond 10 million tokens in a single node.

• The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics. Qatar Investment Authority, Cisco Investments and Naver Ventures were among additional investors.

• Positron also said it is deploying more than 50 racks of Atlas, its first-generation inference system, at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• As part of the financing, Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Dylan Patel, the founder of SemiAnalysis, and Thomas Jermoluk from Jim Clark Office will join Positron's board.