SambaNova Raises $1B at $11B Valuation, JPMorgan Signs On

SambaNova has pulled in a first close of $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in its Series F, TechCrunch reports, with General Atlantic leading and a long list of co-investors including Intel, BlackRock, Qatar Investment Authority, Vista Equity Partners, T. Rowe Price and Capital Group. CEO Rodrigo Liang told the outlet that "in the next few weeks, a few more investors will be coming in, and the second close is likely to finish up."

The money is only half the story. JPMorgan Chase has picked SambaNova as an inference-infrastructure partner and will run the company's SN40L and SN50 systems for secure, on-premises AI inference. Liang's own framing is worth taking at face value: "Having JPMorgan Chase decide they're going to use SambaNova for their inference solution is a big deal." A large regulated bank standing up dedicated on-prem inference silicon, rather than renting Nvidia capacity from a hyperscaler, is the kind of reference win that other banks and insurers tend to copy.

The pace is what makes the round unusual. The Series F comes roughly five months after a $350 million Series E in February 2026 that landed alongside the SN50 unveil, and only about seven months after a December Bloomberg report that Intel had been in acquisition talks with SambaNova at a valuation of around $1.6 billion. Intel did not buy the company; instead, it stayed in as an investor from the Series C onward and is in this round too. Liang described the relationship as one that "lets us leverage the scale of Intel with the technology we have."

The honest caveat is that the reporting does not break out how much of the $1 billion came from General Atlantic versus everyone else, does not quantify JPMorgan's commitment in units or dollars, and does not explain what changed between a roughly $1.6 billion takeout conversation and an $11 billion primary mark in the space of about half a year. The SN50 is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2026, so the customer story is still ahead of the silicon in volume. Take the specifics as reported, not settled.

What is worth watching is whether the JPMorgan deal becomes a template. If regulated enterprises with real inference workloads decide the on-prem SambaNova path is a defensible alternative to Nvidia-plus-cloud, the second close and the ones after it get much easier, and the competitive map for enterprise AI inference genuinely widens.