Positron AI raises $875 million Series C at $5 billion valuation

Positron AI raises $875 million Series C at $5 billion valuation

Thu, September 10, 2026 at 5:09 PM GMT+3 2 min read

• POSC -2.02%

Positron AI raised $875 million at a $5 billion post-money valuation on Thursday, as demand for AI inference hardware continues to climb.

The raise was structured in two tranches. A $375 million Series C, priced at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, drew co-lead investments from NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, and SemiAnalysis Capital, the fund run by analyst Dylan Patel. A follow-on Series C-1 of up to $500 million was anchored by NEA and Netscape co-founder Jim Clark. Additional investors include DFJ Growth, Qatar Investment Authority, Hudson River Trading, Cisco Investments, and Naver Ventures, among others.

Positron's most recent prior funding round was a $230 million raise in February that valued the company at $1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Thursday's round values the company five times higher than that February figure.

Reno, Nevada-based Positron designs inference chips built around memory capacity and bandwidth rather than raw compute. Its next-generation chip, called Asimov, pairs the company's compute architecture with between 288 GB and 2,304 GB of memory per chip using commodity LPDDR5X memory, sidestepping supply constraints around high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging. Asimov is scheduled to tape out on TSMC's N3P process at the end of 2026, with production targeted for the second half of 2027, the company said.

The proceeds will fund the Asimov tapeout, the build-out of a 2-megawatt engineering data center and emulation platform, and the production ramp of Titan, a next-generation inference system that combines four to eight Asimov chips into a single node. Titan is designed to serve models beyond 16 trillion parameters and context windows beyond 10 million tokens, the company said.

Positron's earlier product, the Atlas server rack, has been deployed at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with over 50 racks now in the field. Customers using that capacity include Parasail, Jump Trading, and i3d.net.

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

Positron chief executive Mitesh Agrawal said in a statement that deploying Atlas at Oracle informed the design of 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," Agrawal said in a statement.