AI chip startup Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion in Series E

Silicon Valley-based AI computing startup Tenstorrent has closed USD 1.5 billion in Series E funding at a USD 6.2 billion post-money valuation.

The round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with participation from new and existing investors including Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Brett Barna, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial, and XTX Markets, Tenstorrent said.

Tenstorrent will use the capital to deploy Galaxy servers at scale, continuing to serve open-weight models across LLMs and video generation, and advance the AI and CPU IP it licenses to customers designing their own silicon.

“We built one architecture and sell it at every size,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent. “The future of compute is open, scalable, and owned by the people building on it. Our investors believe in that model too, and we appreciate their support.”

Tenstorrent sells AI compute at every level of the stack — from a single card or workstation to racks, superclusters, and custom IP. With an open-source software stack, developers can run frontier models locally and enterprises can deploy models on-prem at industry-leading latency and throughput.

“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,” said Ben Mahdavi, Founder at Trace Capital.

“Few companies design the chip and the software that runs on it. Tenstorrent does both, and its video generation results beat industry benchmarks ahead of our expectations,” said George Bousis, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Protagonist. “We are excited to double down in the Series E to back Jim and the team through this next phase of growth.”