Positron, a growing force in AI inference technology for AI computing, announced it has raised $23.5 million in funding from a group of investors, including Flume Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, and Resilience Reserve.
This funding will enable Positron to scale production of its U.S.-manufactured, energy-efficient AI chips, offering enterprises a cost-effective alternative to Nvidia’s AI hardware. And they are already shipping products to data centers and neoclouds around the country — which is often seen as insurmountable to chip startups with hundreds of millions or more in backing, and it is a testament to the rapid product-market fit Positron has achieved since launching a couple of years ago.
Positron provides a high-performance and energy-efficient option for customers. And Positron’s Atlas systems are presently achieving 3.5 times better performance per dollar and 3.5 times greater power efficiency than one of its largest rivals for inference. Utilizing a memory-optimized architecture that hits over 93% bandwidth utilization (vs. 10% to 30% for GPUs), Positron’s FPGA-powered servers support trillion-parameter models while offering plug-and-play compatibility with Hugging Face and OpenAI APIs. These systems also deliver 70% faster inference at 66% lower power consumption than H100/H200 setups, reducing data center capital expenditures by 50%.
At the helm of Positron’s next phase of growth is Mitesh Agrawal, who is the company’s newly appointed CEO. Agrawal previously worked as an executive at Lambda, the AI unicorn he helped grow from $500K to $500M in annualized revenue while securing over $1 billion in funding. He now joins Positron’s co-founders Thomas Sohmers and Edward Kmett to advance the company’s goal of delivering domestically made AI computing solutions. Sohmers–a Thiel Fellow and experienced entrepreneur–currently serves as Positron’s Chief Technology Officer, while Kmett–a world-renowned mathematician and functional programming expert–serves as Positron’s Chief Scientist.
Unlike many semiconductor companies that depend heavily on offshore manufacturing, Positron has built a fully American supply chain, ensuring that its AI hardware is designed, fabricated, and assembled within the United States.
Beyond cost savings, Positron’s technology is addressing the growing power constraints of AI infrastructure. And many legacy data centers struggle to support high-power GPUs, which consume as high as 10,000 watts per server, far beyond the capacity of traditional data centers. And Positron’s energy-efficient architecture allows these facilities to participate in AI computing without requiring massive infrastructure upgrades.
KEY QUOTES:
“With this funding, we’re scaling at a pace that AI hardware has never seen before–from expanding shipments of our first-generation products to bringing our second generation accelerators to market in 2026. Our solution is growing rapidly because it outperforms conventional GPUs in both cost and energy efficiency, while delivering AI hardware that eliminates reliance on foreign supply chains.”
- Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron
“Investing in domestic AI hardware is a strategic imperative when it comes to securing America’s global AI posture. Positron is proving that world-class AI compute doesn’t have to come from overseas, and we’re excited to support their mission to make the U.S. a leader in AI hardware manufacturing.”
- Scott McNealy, Operating Partner at Flume Ventures
“The demand for AI compute is skyrocketing, and enterprises are searching for viable alternatives that are energy and cost efficient for the long term. What sets Positron apart is not just its cost efficiency, but its ability to bring AI hardware to market at an unprecedented speed and provide a high performance per watt. Their innovative approach is enabling businesses to scale AI workloads without the typical barriers of cost and power consumption.”
- Rob Reid, Co-founder of Resilience Reserve
