Tenspresso in talks at $500M three months in, no chip yet

The startup is three months old. Its first chip design is not expected to be done until late 2027 or early 2028. Altimeter Capital Management is bidding at a $500 million valuation anyway.

That is the shape of the talks around Tenspresso, a 15-person outfit in Sunnyvale co-founded by Dong Hyuk Woo and Harshit Khaitan, according to Bloomberg. The two are "former engineers who worked together on Google's tensor processing units for several years," per the reporting, and much of the team has come from early AI chip groups at Alphabet. The pitch is silicon for "complex AI work, specifically targeting long context windows that would allow AI models to process larger and more diverse pools of data."

The round would raise at least $50 million. It would land only weeks after a $20 million check from Striker Venture Partners; Altimeter approached the company after that round and a few key hires, Bloomberg says.

Tenspresso is also in talks with design and manufacturing partners "outside the traditional silicon supply chain used by companies like Nvidia and Google," reportedly to sidestep backlogs in sourcing components and securing manufacturing capacity.

No customer is named. No tapeout date is given. It is one of 317 chip stories we have tracked in the last 90 days on our chips feed, most of them, unlike this one, attached to a working product.