Full Breakdown
Tenstorrent Secures $1.5 Billion Series E Funding, Valuation Rises to $6.2 Billion
By Drooid · · How we work
Core Event – Funding Round and Valuation
Tenstorrent Inc. closed a $1.5 billion Series E financing that lifts its post-money valuation to $6.2 billion. The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk Corp., T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments and other institutional investors. Existing backers such as Ark Invest and Fidelity also re-invested. The proceeds will fund scaling of its Galaxy-branded AI servers and expand licensing of its RISC-V-based processor designs.
Background & Context
Founded in 2016 in Toronto by former AMD engineers Ljubisa Bajic, Milos Trajkovic and Ivan Hamer, Tenstorrent relocated to the United States in 2023 after veteran chip architect Jim Keller became CEO. Keller guided the firm through earlier financing that valued it at $2.6 billion in 2024. Earlier in 2026 the company held exploratory takeover talks with Intel and Qualcomm, but chose to remain independent and raise capital instead.
Key Figures & Groups
- Jim Keller – CEO, former senior engineer at AMD, Apple, Intel and Tesla.
- Ben Mahdavi – Co-founder of Trace Capital.
- Ljubisa Bajic – Co-founder of Tenstorrent.
- George Bousis – Managing partner at Protagonist Ventures.
Data & Statistics
- Funding amount: $1.5 billion.
- New valuation: $6.2 billion, more than double the $2.6 billion valuation after the 2024 round.
- Employee headcount: 1,150 worldwide.
- Headquarters in Austin, Texas; hubs in Toronto (?200 staff), Silicon Valley, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore.
Official Statements & Responses
Keller described the May demonstration of Galaxy servers running high-performance models from DeepSeek as a turning point that unlocked investor interest. He noted the company can grow organically by targeting customers who need smaller orders or lower-cost alternatives to GPUs from Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom, and highlighted Tenstorrent’s strategy of offering a single architecture across all form factors and licensing it to partners such as Samsung and LG.
George Bousis praised Tenstorrent’s combined chip-and-software design, noting its video-generation results exceed industry benchmarks.
Why It Matters – Market Impact
The funding positions Tenstorrent to compete more aggressively in the AI inference market, where Nvidia’s GPUs have long dominated. By delivering RISC-V-based processors and open-source software stacks, Tenstorrent offers a customizable alternative for open-weight large language models and AI-generated video. Licensing its architecture to major OEMs expands its reach beyond pure chip sales, diversifying the AI-compute supply chain.
What's Next
Tenstorrent will deploy Galaxy servers at scale for customers running open-weight models, broaden licensing agreements for its AI and CPU designs, and continue developing open-source software that complements its hardware. These steps aim to capture a larger share of the inference market and solidify its role as a vertically integrated AI compute provider.
Verbatim Quotes
- “Jim and his team bring decades of hands-on silicon, software, and IP experience, and we’re excited to partner with Tenstorrent as Galaxy continues to scale,” — Trace Capital’s Mahdavi
- “Once we had the ability to fundraise and demonstrate the performance and started to ship, the investor interest came in,” — Jim Keller
- “We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” — Jim Keller
- “The future of compute is open, scalable and owned by the people building it.” — George Bousis