AI chip startup Positron AI has raised $875 million in a Series C financing round, giving the company a $5 billion post-money valuation.

The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital, and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, with funds raised across two tranches.

The original Series C round, which raised $375 million, was led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and SemiAnalysis Capital, while the Series C-1, which raised up to $500 million, was led by NEA and Jim Clark.

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

In a statement, Positron AI said the funding will support the tapeout of Asimov, the company’s second-generation chip, in addition to the bring-up of a 2MW+ engineering data center and emulation platform, and the production ramp of Titan, its forthcoming inference system.

Designed to support memory-intensive AI workloads, Asimov supports 2TB of memory per accelerator and 8TB of memory per Titan system – bandwidth that Positron claims is similar to Nvidia’s Rubin GPU. At rack scale, the company said these figures translate to memory capacity totaling more than 100TB.

Positron is on track to tape out Asimov in October 2026 – 16 months after launching the design process for the chip – with production slated for the second half of 2027.

"Speed matters in this market, both in how quickly we ship new generations of silicon and in how quickly they reach customers," said Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI. "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."

Founded in 2023, the Reno, Nevada-based startup is developing energy-efficient hardware that is purpose-built for inferencing workloads.

The company’s first-generation chip, dubbed Atlas, was fabricated by Intel in the US and is currently shipping to customers. Positron claims the hardware can achieve three times the compute per watt of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.