Positron AI has raised $875 million in Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation to bring its next-generation AI inference silicon and systems to market following deployment of more than 50 racks of its first-generation Atlas platform at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The financing was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital and Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.
As part of the round, Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Thomas Jermoluk from Jim Clark Office and Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis Capital are joining Positron’s board.
Positron develops hardware and software designed to make AI inference less expensive and more energy efficient.
The company is focused on the increasing shift in AI infrastructure from training models toward running them in production, where large workloads can be constrained by memory capacity, memory bandwidth and power consumption.
Positron’s next-generation systems are designed around a memory-first architecture that can realize more than 90% of available memory bandwidth.
The systems use commodity LPDDR5X memory, allowing Positron to avoid dependence on constrained high-bandwidth memory and CoWoS advanced packaging supply chains.
The architecture is also designed to support both air-cooled and liquid-cooled data centers across varying rack densities.
Positron is deploying more than 50 racks of Atlas at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Parasail uses that capacity for its inference service, while additional Atlas production customers include Jump Trading and i3d.net.
The $875 million financing was completed in two tranches.
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 SemiAnalysis Capital.
A subsequent Series C-1 of up to $500 million was led by NEA and Jim Clark. Additional investors included DFJ Growth, Qatar Investment Authority, Resilience Reserve, Arena Private Wealth, Natural Capital, Helena, 1517 Fund, Flume Ventures, Unless, Boardman Bay Capital Management, Fincadia Advisors, Banyan Ventures and U First Capital.
Strategic participants included VentureTech Alliance, Hudson River Trading, Cisco Investments and Naver Ventures.
The financing will fully fund the tapeout of Asimov, Positron’s next-generation custom silicon, along with development of a 2-megawatt-plus engineering data center and emulation platform and the production ramp for its Titan inference system.
Asimov is scheduled to tape out using TSMC’s N3P process at the end of 2026, with production expected during the second half of 2027.
Each Asimov chip is expected to combine Positron’s compute architecture with 288 GB to 2,304 GB of memory.
Titan will combine four to eight Asimov chips in a single system and is being designed to serve models with more than 16 trillion parameters and context windows exceeding 10 million tokens in a single node, while scaling to thousands of nodes.
KEY QUOTES:
“Speed matters in this market, both in how quickly we ship new generations of silicon and in how quickly they reach customers. Deploying Atlas at scale taught us an enormous amount about what inference customers actually need, and we have carried those lessons directly into 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. This financing gives us the resources to do exactly that,” said Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI.
Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI
“We spend our lives measuring what AI hardware actually delivers in production, and most inference economics struggle under that scrutiny. Positron’s architecture addresses the real constraint, memory, without depending on HBM or advanced packaging for its next-generation systems, and the team has already banked real deployment experience with its first generation inside Oracle. That is why I am investing and joining the board,” said Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis Capital, who joins Positron’s board of directors as part of the round.
Dylan Patel, Founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis Capital
“Positron is solving the constraint that actually matters right now. While the rest of the industry is racing to secure scarce HBM and packaging capacity — even Nvidia’s Rubin Ultra roadmap has had to scale back, from a terabyte of HBM4E down toward 192GB, simply because the supply isn’t there — Positron built Asimov and Titan to sidestep that dependence altogether. That’s not incremental, that’s a fundamentally different bet, and they’ve already proven they can execute on it: Atlas is running at scale inside Oracle’s cloud today. We led this round because we believe Positron is making the boldest memory-first bet in AI hardware. We couldn’t be more excited to back Mitesh, Thomas and the team as they bring Asimov and Titan to market,” said Forest Baskett, Partner, NEA.
Forest Baskett, Partner at NEA
