Positron AI raised $875 million in Series C funding at a $5 billion valuation to accelerate production of its Asimov cus

Positron AI, an AI inference hardware company focused on making model serving dramatically cheaper and more energy efficient, announced an $875 million Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation. The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis Capital, and Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Thomas Jermoluk from the Jim Clark Office, and Dylan Patel will join Positron's board of directors.

The company is shifting focus from the training model era to the inference era, where every agent, assistant, and copilot requires inference at scale. Positron builds memory-first inference systems designed to address the real constraints of inference workloads: memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and power consumption. The next-generation systems realize more than 90 percent of available memory bandwidth, are built on commodity LPDDR5X memory that avoids the constrained HBM and CoWoS supply chains, and deliver leading tokens per dollar and tokens per watt. The highly energy-efficient architecture enables deployment in both air-cooled and liquid-cooled data centers at varying rack densities.

CEO Mitesh Agrawal said, "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."

Positron is deploying more than 50 racks of Atlas, its first-generation inference system, at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with Parasail, a key partner, utilizing that capacity to power its own inference service. Additional Atlas production customers include Jump Trading and i3d.net.

The financing was raised in two tranches. The Series C of $375 million at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation was co-led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and SemiAnalysis Capital. The Series C-1, up to $500 million, was led by NEA and Jim Clark. Additional investors include 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 alongside strategic investors VentureTech Alliance, Hudson River Trading, Cisco Investments, and Naver Ventures.

The capital will fully fund the tapeout of Asimov, Positron's next-generation silicon; the bring-up of a 2 megawatt-plus engineering data center and emulation platform; and the production ramp of Titan, including LPDDR5X supply commitments, production capacity, system integration, and go-to-market expansion. Asimov tapes out on TSMC N3P at the end of 2026, with production in the second half of 2027. Each Asimov chip will pair Positron's compute architecture with 288 gigabytes to 2,304 gigabytes of memory. Titan combines four to eight Asimov chips into a single system, designed to serve models beyond 16 trillion parameters and context windows beyond 10 million tokens in a single node, scaling to thousands of nodes.

Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis Capital, said, "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."

Forest Baskett, Partner at NEA, said, "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 192 gigabytes 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."

Jim Clark, Silicon Graphics founder and Netscape co-founder, noted, "The Positron inference architecture balances compute, the enormous required memory bandwidth and extraordinarily large context and weight storage. Its optimized power consumption, cost and density is near ideal for inference requirements of the next evolution of Frontier large language models with trillions of parameters."

Paul Tuan, Managing Partner of Andra Capital, said, "AI inference is emerging as one of the world's most consequential infrastructure markets and Positron's memory-first architecture addresses the performance, power and deployment constraints of modern AI systems. We are excited to partner with Mitesh, Thomas and the Positron team as they build the foundational infrastructure for the inference era."