Positron AI raises $875 million at $5 billion valuation across two tranches for next-generation AI hardware development.

Positron AI, an AI chip startup, has raised $875 million in Series C financing, valuing the company at $5 billion on a post-money basis. The round, divided into two tranches, was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital, and Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

The original Series C tranche raised $375 million and was led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and SemiAnalysis Capital. A subsequent Series C-1 tranche raised up to $500 million and was led by NEA and Jim Clark.

Four executives have joined Positron's board: Forest Baskett (NEA), Gavin Baker (Atreides Management), Thomas Jermoluk (Jim Clark Office), and Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis Capital).

The funding will support the tapeout of Asimov, Positron's second-generation chip, the build-out of a 2MW+ engineering data center and emulation platform, and the production ramp of Titan, its forthcoming inference system.

Asimov is designed to support memory-intensive AI workloads, offering 2TB of memory per accelerator and 8TB per Titan system—bandwidth comparable to Nvidia's Rubin GPU, according to the company. At rack scale, these specifications translate to more than 100TB of aggregate memory capacity.

Positron is targeting an October 2026 tapeout for Asimov, 16 months after design inception, with production slated for the second half of 2027.

"Speed matters in this market, both in how quickly we ship new generations of silicon and in how quickly they reach customers," said Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI. "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."

Positron, founded in 2023 and based in Reno, Nevada, develops energy-efficient hardware purpose-built for inferencing workloads. The company's first-generation chip, Atlas, was fabricated by Intel in the United States and is currently shipping to customers. Positron claims Atlas achieves three times the compute per watt of Nvidia's H100 GPUs.