SambaNova Raises $350M, Partners with Intel
SambaNova Systems has raised over $350 million in a Series E funding round that includes Intel Capital. The company also unveiled its fifth-generation Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU), which it claims outperforms Nvidia's B200 for agentic AI workloads. As part of the deal, SambaNova will collaborate with Intel on manufacturing and cloud capacity expansion.
- The Series E funding round was led by Vista Equity Partners and Cambium Capital, with notable participation from new and existing investors including Battery Ventures, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. - SambaNova's fifth-generation SN50 RDU is designed for inference workloads and features a three-tier memory architecture (SRAM, HBM, and DDR5) to support models with over 10 trillion parameters and context lengths exceeding 10 million tokens. This architecture, known as a Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU), is designed to minimize data movement, a major bottleneck in traditional GPU architectures. - According to benchmarks from SemiAnalysis, on a Llama 3.3 70B model, the SN50 achieves 895 tokens per second per user at FP8 precision, compared to 184 for Nvidia's B200. Across a range of models, SambaNova claims the SN50 has an average throughput advantage of 3x over the B200. - The collaboration with Intel is a multi-year strategic plan focused on joint go-to-market execution through Intel's enterprise and cloud channels. The partnership aims to combine Intel's Xeon processors and networking with SambaNova's AI systems to offer a GPU alternative for enterprise and government customers. - SoftBank Corp. is the first customer for the new SN50 chip and will deploy it in its next-generation AI data centers in Japan. This deployment will serve as the inference backbone for SoftBank's sovereign AI initiatives and agentic AI services in the Asia-Pacific region. - SambaNova was founded in 2017 by Rodrigo Liang, a former senior vice president at Oracle who led SPARC processor development, and two Stanford professors, Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Ré. Olukotun is known as the "father of the multi-core processor" for his pioneering work on chip multiprocessor designs at Stanford in the 1990s. - Prior to this Series E round, SambaNova had raised over $1.1 billion. Its Series D in April 2021, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, valued the company at $5.1 billion. However, reports from late 2025 suggested a significant drop in its implied valuation amid a challenging fundraising environment for AI hardware companies. - The company's go-to-market strategy is a full-stack approach, providing integrated hardware, software, and pre-trained models. This is intended to reduce the need for customers to have expertise in proprietary programming languages like CUDA. Their target customers include large enterprises in financial services and healthcare, as well as government and research institutions.
