An AI infrastructure company that designs custom AI chips (Reconfigurable Dataflow Units) and full-stack hardware-software systems for running AI training and inference in data centers and the cloud.
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Funding roundsSecondary market price
Unusually volatile valuation path: $5.1B peak (2021) down to ~$2.4B in a Feb 2026 down round, then rebounding to $11B five months later -- reflecting swings in AI-chip investor sentiment amid competition from Nvidia, Cerebras, and Groq. The July 2026 Series F was explicitly announced as a 'first close'; CEO Rodrigo Liang told TechCrunch a second close was expected 'in the next few weeks,' but no subsequent report confirms it completed, gave a final total raised, or a revised valuation as of Sept 2026 -- treat the round as still officially first-close pending fresher reporting. No S-1 filed; Liang has said on CNBC he is 'strongly considering' an IPO, most likely in the US, in roughly the next 12 months from mid-2026.
Low: Revelio Labs, Mar 2026. High: Tracxn, Aug 2026.
As of 2026-09-13 · live via greenhouse's public job board · ≈13.8% of the 391–405 estimated team
+1 more roles across 1 other teams.
See all open roles at SambaNova →SambaNova designs an AI processor it calls a Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit: a tiled grid of configurable compute units and programmer-managed memory units joined by mesh switches and programmed through its SambaFlow software. It sells the chips in rack-scale systems and through an inference cloud, and in February 2026 announced the SN50 chip for agentic inference.
| Date | Type | What |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 24, 2026 | Milestone | SN50 chip for agentic inference and a planned multi-year Intel collaboration announced; the company names SoftBank Corp. as first customer to deploy |
| Sep 10, 2024 | Milestone | SambaNova Cloud, an inference API on SN40L, opened |
| 2024 | Milestone | SN40L detailed at Hot Chips 2024: 5 nm, 102 billion transistors and a three-tier memory of 520 MB SRAM, 64 GB HBM and up to 1.5 TB of DDR |
| 2024 | Milestone | MICRO 2024 paper pairs the SN40L memory hierarchy with a Composition of Experts system of 150 expert models totalling a trillion parameters |
| 2024 | Paper | SambaLingo: Teaching Large Language Models New Languages |
| 2024 | Paper | SambaNova SN40L: Scaling the AI Memory Wall with Dataflow and Composition of Experts |
| 2024 | Paper | SambaNova SN40L RDU: Breaking the Barrier of Trillion+ Parameter Scale Gen AI Computing |
| Sep 19, 2023 | Milestone | SN40L chip, manufactured by TSMC, announced |
| Sep 14, 2022 | Milestone | Second-generation DataScale SN30 announced |
| Jul 15, 2022 | Patent filed | US 12,143,298 Peer-to-peer communication between reconfigurable dataflow units |
| 2022 | Milestone | Three-author company paper on the SN10 appeared at ISSCC 2022 |
| 2022 | Paper | SambaNova SN10 RDU: A 7nm Dataflow Architecture to Accelerate Software 2.0 |
| Oct 26, 2021 | Patent filed | US 12,093,551 Memory unit partitioning solutions for reconfigurable dataflow computing systems |
| Dec 9, 2020 | Milestone | DataScale rack-scale system announced with the first chip, the Cardinal SN10, described by the company as a TSMC 7 nm part with 40 billion transistors |
| Jan 3, 2019 | Patent filed | US 10,698,853 Virtualization of a reconfigurable data processor |
| Nov 21, 2018 | Patent filed | US 10,831,507 Configuration load of a reconfigurable data processor |
| Nov 21, 2018 | Patent filed | US 11,188,497 Configuration unload of a reconfigurable data processor |
| Nov 2018 | Milestone | Earliest listed patents filed (November 2018 and January 2019), on loading and unloading configuration state in the array and virtualising it |
| Nov 2017 | Milestone | SambaNova started by Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Re with Rodrigo Liang, who became CEO |
| 2017 | Milestone | Stanford's Plasticine reconfigurable architecture, a documented origin of the design, presented at ISCA 2017 before the company existed |
| 2017 | Paper | Plasticine: A Reconfigurable Architecture For Parallel Patterns |
Patents. The five listed patents are all assigned to SambaNova Systems and cover RDU configuration load and unload, virtualisation, peer-to-peer links between RDUs and compiler memory partitioning.
No acquisitions on record.
SambaNova Systems was started in November 2017 by Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Re with Rodrigo Liang, a former Oracle and Sun processor-development executive who became CEO. A documented origin of the architecture is Stanford's Plasticine, a reconfigurable architecture for parallel patterns presented at ISCA 2017 by Raghu Prabhakar, Olukotun and colleagues before the company existed; Prabhakar later presented SambaNova's chips as a company architect. The company calls its processor a Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU): a tiled grid of Pattern Compute Units (configurable as a systolic array or vector unit) and Pattern Memory Units (programmer-managed scratchpad memory) joined by mesh switches, programmed through its SambaFlow software stack. The earliest patents listed here, filed November 2018 and January 2019, concern loading and unloading configuration state in such an array and virtualising it.
The first chip, the Cardinal SN10, was described by the company at launch as a TSMC 7 nm part with 40 billion transistors; a three-author company paper on it appeared at ISSCC 2022. It shipped in the rack-scale DataScale system announced December 9, 2020, sold outright or by monthly subscription as 'Dataflow-as-a-Service'. The second-generation DataScale SN30 was announced September 14, 2022. The SN40L, announced September 19, 2023 and manufactured by TSMC, was later detailed at Hot Chips 2024: 5 nm, 102 billion transistors, 1,040 compute and memory units, and a three-tier memory of 520 MB on-chip SRAM, 64 GB HBM and up to 1.5 TB of DDR, rated by the company at 638 bf16 TFLOPS. The company's MICRO 2024 paper pairs this memory hierarchy with a 'Composition of Experts' system of 150 expert models totalling a trillion parameters, and the company says a single SN40L node can serve a model of up to five trillion parameters. SambaNova Cloud, an inference API on SN40L, opened September 10, 2024.
On February 24, 2026 SambaNova announced the SN50 chip for agentic inference, a Series E of more than $350 million led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital with Intel Capital participating, and a planned multi-year collaboration with Intel. The company says the SN50 runs up to five times faster than competing chips and names SoftBank Corp. as the first customer to deploy it; Bloomberg reported shipments were due later in 2026. This followed a December 12, 2025 Bloomberg report that Intel was in advanced talks to buy SambaNova for about $1.6 billion including debt, and a January 21, 2026 report that those talks had stalled; Bloomberg noted that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is SambaNova's chairman. On July 8, 2026 the company announced the first close of a $1 billion financing.
The five patents listed are all assigned to SambaNova Systems and cover RDU configuration load and unload, virtualisation, peer-to-peer links between RDUs and compiler memory partitioning; Google Patents shows a security interest in favour of Silicon Valley Bank recorded in April 2025 on at least one of them. The company has published some model work openly, including the SambaLingo language-adaptation paper and checkpoints (2024). No acquisitions by SambaNova were found.
Profile as of Sep 19, 2026.
| Round | Date | Valuation | Lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series F (first close) | 2026-07-08 | $11.0B+358% | General Atlantic (sole lead; Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, and Intel Capital also participated) |
| Series E | 2026-02-01 | $2.4B-53% | Co-led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital (Intel Capital a significant participant) |
| Series D | 2021-04-13 | $5.1B | SoftBank Vision Fund 2 |
| Undisclosed round (SEC Form D) | 2020-02-20 | — | Not disclosed -- SEC Form D lists only the company's own officers/directors, not the investor(s) |
| Undisclosed round (SEC Form D) | 2019-03-29 | — | Not disclosed -- SEC Form D lists only the company's own officers/directors, not the investor(s) |
| Undisclosed round (SEC Form D) | 2018-03-02 | — | Not disclosed -- SEC Form D lists only the company's own officers/directors, not the investor(s) |
No upcoming rounds currently reported.
These are on the public record as giving exposure to SambaNova. Buying one means owning a stake in the vehicle, not in SambaNova, and the vehicle takes fees along the way.
| Vehicle | How you get exposure | Share of the vehicle | Who can buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| BlackRock Science and Technology Term Trust Listed closed-end fund | Held directly | 3.70% of the fund | Anyone with a brokerage account that can trade US-listed shares. |
| BlackRock Science and Technology Trust Listed closed-end fund | Held directly | 1.77% of the fund | Anyone with a brokerage account that can trade US-listed shares. |
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| Status | S-1 Not Filed |
|---|---|
| Timing | ~2027 (roughly 12 months out from mid-2026, per CEO) |
| Notes | CEO Rodrigo Liang: 'strongly considering' an IPO, most likely in the US. |
| Source | CNBC, Jun 5 2026 and Jul 8 2026 |
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