AI & RoboticsNews

SambaNova Systems raises $250 million for software-defined AI hardware

The infrastructure required to handle AI workloads is often as complex as it is sprawling, but a cottage industry of startups has emerged whose focus is developing solutions for end customers. SambaNova Systems is one such startup — the Palo Alto, California-based firm, which was founded in 2017 by Rodrigo Liang and Stanford Professors Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré, provides systems that run AI and data-intensive apps from the datacenter to the edge. In a reflection of investors’ ravenous appetite for the market, it today announced that it’s raised $250 million in series C funding.

“Raising $250M in this funding round with support from new and existing investors puts us in a unique category of capitalization,” said CEO Liang, a veteran of Sun Microsystems and Oracle. “This enables us to further extend our market leadership in enterprise computing.”

SambaNova’s products — and its customers, for that matter — remain largely under lock and key, but the company previously revealed it’s developing “software-defined” devices inspired by DARPA-funded research in efficient AI processing.  Leveraging a combination of algorithmic optimizations and custom board-based hardware, SambaNova claims it’s able to dramatically improve the performance and capability of most AI-imbued apps.

According to Olukotun, SambaNova’s platform is designed to scale from tiny electronic devices to enormous remote datacenters. “SambaNova’s innovations in machine learning algorithms and software-defined hardware will dramatically improve the performance and capability of intelligent applications,” he added. “The flexibility of the SambaNova technology will enable us to build a unified platform providing tremendous benefits for business intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics.”

One thing’s for certain: SambaNova’s founders are a decorated bunch. Olukotun — who recently received the IEEE’s Computer Society’s Harry H. Goode Memorial Award — is the leader of the Stanford Hydra Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) research project, which produced a chip design that pairs four specialized processors and their caches with a shared secondary cache. As for Ré, he’s an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University in the InfoLab and a MacArthur Genius Award recipient who’s also affiliated with the Statistical Machine Learning Group, Pervasive Parallelism Lab, and Stanford AI Lab.

The AI chip market is anticipated to be worth $91.18 billion by 2025, and dedicated AI chip startups raised $1.5 billion in 2017 alone, among them Kneron, Blaize, AIStorm, Graphcore, Quadric, and Esperanto Technologies. But SambaNova’s total raised — over $450 million to date, following a $56 million series A funding round in March 2018 and a $150 million serise B funding round in April 2019 — is nothing to shake a stick at.BlackRock led the series C round with participation from existing investors including GV, Intel Capital, Walden International, WRVI Capital, and Redline Capital.
Sign up for Funding Weekly to start your week with VB’s top funding stories.


Author: Kyle Wiggers.
Source: Venturebeat

Related posts
AI & RoboticsNews

The show’s not over: 2024 sees big boost to AI investment

AI & RoboticsNews

AI on your smartphone? Hugging Face’s SmolLM2 brings powerful models to the palm of your hand

AI & RoboticsNews

Why multi-agent AI tackles complexities LLMs can’t

DefenseNews

US Army buys long-flying solar drones to watch over Pacific units

Sign up for our Newsletter and
stay informed!