Positron raises $875M to advance next-gen inference silicon

Nevada-based AI inference hardware company Positron AI has announced a USD 875 million Series C financing at a USD 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, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. 

As part of the financing, Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Thomas Jermoluk from Jim Clark Office and Dylan Patel will join Positron's board of directors, according to a press release.

Positron’s next-gen systems realize more than 90 percent of their available memory bandwidth, are built on commodity LPDDR5X memory that sidesteps constrained HBM and CoWoS supply chains, and deliver leading tokens per dollar and tokens per watt, the US company said.

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

“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,” said Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI. “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.” 

The financing will fully fund the tapeout of Asimov, Positron's next-generation silicon; the bring-up of a 2 MW+ engineering data center and emulation platform; and the production ramp of Titan, Positron’s next-generation inference system, including LPDDR5X supply commitments, production capacity, system integration, and go-to-market expansion.  

“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,” said Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis Capital, who joins Positron's board of directors as part of the round. 

“While the rest of the industry is racing to secure scarce HBM and packaging capacity…Positron built Asimov and Titan to sidestep that dependence altogether,” said Forest Baskett, Partner, NEA. “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.”