AI chip startup Positron AI has raised $875 million in a Series C funding round at a $5 billion post-money valuation. The company will use the money to develop its next generation of AI chips and expand manufacturing.
The funding was raised in two parts. The first was a $375 million Series C at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, co-led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis Capital. A Series C-1 of up to $500 million was led by NEA and Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and co-founder of Netscape.
Other investors included DFJ Growth, Qatar Investment Authority, Resilience Reserve, Arena Private Wealth, Hudson River Trading, Cisco Investments and Naver Ventures.
NEA's Forest Baskett, Atreides Management's Gavin Baker, Thomas Jermoluk from Jim Clark Office, and SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel will join Positron's board as part of the round.
The funding comes six months after Positron raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation in February. Its valuation has increased fivefold since then.
Funding Asimov and Titan
Positron makes chips for AI inference, which is when a trained AI model is used to answer questions or perform tasks. The company said running AI models quickly and at scale is increasingly limited by how much data systems can store and move, as well as how much power they use.
Positron said its next-generation systems will use widely available LPDDR5X memory. This will reduce its reliance on high-bandwidth memory and advanced chip packaging, which remain in limited supply.
The new funding will help Positron complete the design of Asimov, its next-generation chip, the company said. It will also fund a more than 2 MW engineering data center and testing platform.
Positron will also use the money to bring its Titan inference system into production and secure memory and manufacturing capacity.
"Our focus now is to tape out Asimov, bring Titan to production, and scale manufacturing to meet the demand in front of us," Positron CEO Mitesh Agrawal said.
Positron expects to finish Asimov's design for manufacturing on TSMC's N3P process by the end of 2026, with production planned for the second half of 2027.
Each Asimov chip will have between 288 GB and about 2.3 TB of memory. Titan will combine four to eight Asimov chips in one system.
Positron is also deploying more than 50 server racks of Atlas, its first-generation inference system, at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Parasail uses some of that capacity for its inference service, while Jump Trading and i3d.net are also Atlas customers.
The funding comes as investors continue backing companies competing in an AI chip market dominated by Nvidia. Cerebras Systems raised $1 billion at a $23 billion valuation in February before going public in May.
Inference chip startup d-Matrix, valued at $2 billion after raising $450 million in November 2025, said Thursday that its next-generation chips will connect directly with Nvidia data center systems.