Intel Capital and Partners Invest $150 Million to Accelerate SambaNova’s AI Platform

SambaNova Systems is the maker of the most advanced systems platforms to execute Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications from the data center to the edge. Their expertise has caught the attention of Intel Capital and GV (known earlier as Google Ventures) who are now investing a whopping $150 million as a part of its Series B funding to the organization. Other investors include:

• Walden International
• Atlantic Bridge Ventures
• Redline Capital

The funding will skyrocket SambaNova in improving their products and capabilities, finding new markets and extending its product roadmap.

SambaNova was founded by Stanford Professors Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré in 2017. Olukotun laid the foundation of the multi-core processor along with leading the Stanford Hydra Chip Multiprocessor project.

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Ré is a Computer Science Professor at Stanford University and a MacArthur Genius Award recipient. His Stanford affiliations are inclined towards Machine Learning, Pervasive Parallelism and Artifical Intelligence.

Speaking about the development, Rodrigo Liang, Co-Founder and CEO of SambaNova, said, “It’s an exciting time to be able to partner with industry powerhouses in semiconductors and AI software to help revolutionize the AI market. With this round of funding and with our investors’ support, SambaNova is poised to accelerate the next generation of AI applications with a radically new systems architecture to empower forward-moving organizations to strategically deploy AI at scale.”

Wendell Brooks, Senior Vice President of Intel Corp. and President of Intel Capital, said, “Artificial intelligence technology is rapidly developing, and Intel sees the potential to address many of the world’s biggest challenges as AI matures. The SambaNova team has the enterprise expertise and proven ability to bring systems to market. Our continued investments in AI leaders reflect our confidence in the technology’s ability to usher in a new era of computing.”

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Dave Munichiello, General Partner at GV, added, “Moore’s Law famously set the pace for the semiconductor industry for nearly four decades as chip processing speed ramped in step with sequential hardware advancements. Today, large-scale chip players are under pressure from their most sophisticated customers to power compute-hungry tasks like Artificial intelligence, while simultaneously crashing into the limitations of both physics and economics.”

“SambaNova’s ‘software-defined hardware’ approach incorporates current thinking from respected AI hubs, that constantly-evolving software advances (like artificial intelligence, neural nets, and deep learning) can be leveraged in real time to further maximize hardware performance. We’re incredibly excited about SambaNova’s early results and this company’s potential to be an important platform driving the next step function in performance for the world’s most sophisticated and demanding enterprises,” he added.

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Lip-Bu Tan, Chairman of Walden International and CEO of Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ: CDNS) said, “SambaNova is at the core of the AI computing paradigm that we are experiencing today. The company has top technical talent, scalable systems design expertise and an experienced leadership team to develop a complete hardware and software solution purpose-built from the ground up for AI. No other company could have assembled a more impressive group of industry luminaries to expand the community growth around their unique technology.”

The main difference between SambaNova and other traditional AI companies is that SambaNova has developed an entire systems architecture whereas most AI-hardware businesses develop a single technology component(s).

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