Key Takeaways
- • Tenstorrent closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, more than doubling the $2.6 billion valuation it reached in late 2024, according to HedgeCo.Net.
- • The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from ARK Invest, Fidelity Management & Research, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets, among others.
- • The round follows reported acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion, which Tenstorrent declined in favor of remaining independent, per Bloomberg and TechCrunch.
- • The investor mix of crossover mutual fund managers, a strategic corporate investor and electronic trading firms signals AI hardware rounds moving into asset-manager and trading-firm balance sheets ahead of any public listing.
- • Key tests ahead include volume manufacturing and customer deployments of Galaxy systems, and whether its RISC-V licensing model can win additional chip designers.
Summary
AI computing company Tenstorrent said on Monday that it has closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, according to HedgeCo.Net. The valuation more than doubles the $2.6 billion mark the company reached in late 2024. Trace Capital and Innovation X led the round, with participation from new and existing investors including ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets.
Tenstorrent is led by chief executive Jim Keller, the chip architect previously associated with Apple's A4 and A5 processors, AMD's Zen architecture and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip. The company builds RISC-V-based AI processors and systems. It said it will use the proceeds to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale, continue serving open-weight models across large language models and video generation, and advance the AI and CPU intellectual property it licenses to customers designing their own silicon. Licensees include Samsung and LG.
The raise comes roughly five months after Tenstorrent reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion, TechCrunch reported. Keller told Bloomberg that the company chose to remain independent and raise additional capital after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. In the announcement, Keller said, "We built one architecture and sell it at every size."
The investor composition is notable for allocators. Trace Capital, one of the two leads, was founded in 2026 by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi. The round blends late-stage venture capital with crossover mutual fund managers such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, a strategic investor in Sandisk, and electronic trading firms Virtu and XTX. The structure reflects how AI hardware financing has moved beyond traditional venture funds into the balance sheets of asset managers and trading firms seeking exposure to inference compute before a public listing.
Tenstorrent is one of several AI hardware startups seeking to take share from Nvidia in inference workloads. Its next milestones are volume manufacturing and customer deployments of Galaxy systems, along with whether its licensing model can attract more chip designers as sovereign buyers and inference platforms look for alternatives to a single supplier.
Tenstorrent is led by chief executive Jim Keller, the chip architect previously associated with Apple's A4 and A5 processors, AMD's Zen architecture and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip. The company builds RISC-V-based AI processors and systems. It said it will use the proceeds to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale, continue serving open-weight models across large language models and video generation, and advance the AI and CPU intellectual property it licenses to customers designing their own silicon. Licensees include Samsung and LG.
The raise comes roughly five months after Tenstorrent reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm at valuations of as much as $5 billion, TechCrunch reported. Keller told Bloomberg that the company chose to remain independent and raise additional capital after demonstrating that its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models. In the announcement, Keller said, "We built one architecture and sell it at every size."
The investor composition is notable for allocators. Trace Capital, one of the two leads, was founded in 2026 by Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi. The round blends late-stage venture capital with crossover mutual fund managers such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, a strategic investor in Sandisk, and electronic trading firms Virtu and XTX. The structure reflects how AI hardware financing has moved beyond traditional venture funds into the balance sheets of asset managers and trading firms seeking exposure to inference compute before a public listing.
Tenstorrent is one of several AI hardware startups seeking to take share from Nvidia in inference workloads. Its next milestones are volume manufacturing and customer deployments of Galaxy systems, along with whether its licensing model can attract more chip designers as sovereign buyers and inference platforms look for alternatives to a single supplier.
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