Positron AI, a Reno, Nevada company that designs hardware for running AI models, raised $875m in a Series C financing at a $5bn post-money valuation, it announced on 10 September 2026. The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital, the fund of analyst Dylan Patel, and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and co-founder of Netscape.
The money came in two tranches. The first, the Series C proper, was $375m at a $3.5bn pre-money valuation and was co-led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides, Valor and SemiAnalysis Capital. The second, a Series C-1 of up to $500m, was led by NEA and Clark. The release did not explain how the two tranches relate to the $5bn post-money figure.
Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides, Thomas Jermoluk of Jim Clark's office and Patel are joining Positron's board as part of the deal.
“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.”Mitesh Agrawal, CEO, Positron AI
What Positron builds
Positron makes systems for AI inference, the work of running trained models to answer queries, which the company says is now constrained mainly by memory capacity, memory bandwidth and power. Its systems use commodity LPDDR5X memory instead of the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced packaging that most AI accelerators rely on and that are in short supply. The company says its next-generation systems use more than 90% of their available memory bandwidth and can run in air-cooled or liquid-cooled data centres.
Its first-generation system, Atlas, is already shipping. Positron said it is deploying more than 50 racks of Atlas at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, where partner Parasail uses the capacity for its own inference service. Jump Trading is another production customer.
Its next chip, Asimov, is due to tape out on TSMC's N3P process at the end of 2026, with production in the second half of 2027, and will carry between 288GB and 2,304GB of memory per chip. Titan, a system that combines four to eight Asimov chips, is designed to serve models with more than 16 trillion parameters and context windows beyond 10 million tokens on a single node. Mitesh Agrawal is chief executive.
Who invested
Other investors include DFJ Growth, the 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. VentureTech Alliance, Hudson River Trading, Cisco Investments and Naver Ventures joined as strategic investors.
Patel said Positron's design tackled memory, which he called the real constraint, without depending on HBM or advanced packaging. Baskett said NEA backed the company because it saw Positron making the boldest memory-first bet in AI hardware.
The funding so far
The round came seven months after Positron announced an oversubscribed $230m Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of more than $1bn, co-led by Arena Private Wealth, Jump Trading and Unless, according to TechCrunch and Verdict. TechCrunch reported at the time that the three-year-old company had previously raised $75m in 2025 from investors including Valor, Atreides, DFJ Growth, Flume Ventures and Resilience Reserve, bringing its total to just over $300m before this round.
Positron said the new money will fully fund the Asimov tapeout, the bring-up of an engineering data centre of more than 2MW with an emulation platform, and the production ramp of Titan, including supply commitments for LPDDR5X memory, manufacturing capacity, system integration and sales.
Company website: positron.ai