AI chip maker SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation, 5 months after last mega round; plus, popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M

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Speaker B: AI uh, chip company Sombanova Systems has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic in a first close of its Series F round, with more investors expected to join soon, Rodrigo Leong, CEO and co founder of Sambanova, told TechCrunch. In the next few weeks a few more investors will be coming in and the, um, second close is likely to finish up. The latest round comes roughly five months after the Palo Alto, California based startup company unveiled its S950 chip alongside a $350 million Series E in February. Sabanova had also been in acquisition talks with Intel, a deal valuing at roughly $1.6 billion. That's according to a December report from Bloomberg. Asked whether closing its Series E and F rounds meant Sambanova, founded back in 2017, had settled on staying independent, Liang was non committal, he said. The company keeps fielding interest. The door is open to such an exit in this dynamic AI market, the CEO said, but momentum and growth will most likely drive the company toward being public at some point. Sambanova's ties to Intel, a backer since its Series C, and a participant in this latest round have deepened. Five months ago, the nine year old startup announced a multi year partnership with intel to support AI inference development based on Intel's Xeon chip. The two now co develop products and take them to market together. Alongside the new funding, Sambanova said it has been selected by JPMorgan Chase as an inference infrastructure partner with its SN40L and SN50 systems sent to Power Secure on premises AI inference at the bank, Leong told TechCrunch. Having JPMorgan Chase decide they're going to use Sambanova for their inference solution is a big deal. Liang said the JP Morgan win was a signal to the broader market. Banks of the caliber of JP Morgan are now building their own private secure infrastructure to run inference on their most sensitive models, a move he expects to resonate beyond banking enterprises and governments are just starting their AI journey. Leon continued, with most of the growth so far concentrated among tech's model makers and frontier labs, leaving what he called a huge amount of revenue still on the table. Sambanova launched its SN40L in September of 2023, available in the cloud and on premises from November 2023. Its next generation SN50 unveile February of this year is due to begin shipping to customers in the second half of this year, with SoftBank as its first deployment partner. Liang said Sambanova's edge is premium inference, running the largest models and running them fast. Today's frontier models span trillions of parameters, and he said Sambanova was built specifically to handle them at that scale. The company fits multi trillion parameter models onto a single rack, which helps them run quickly. Sambanova sees three types of customers. The first is sovereign clouds, where governments fund local partners to build private clouds, a UH push Liang expects Sambanova to figure centrally in. The second is Neo clouds and the third is enterprises building for their own use. In addition to JP Morgan, it also names Saudi Aramco, intel and other Japanese firms as customers. Sambanova will use the proceeds to scale the business and shore up its supply chain against what Liang called an incredible wave of demand. He said we're using that capital to secure the supply chain, describing it as essential to fulfilling orders and buying the materials the company needs to deliver over the next 12 months. Other investors participating include Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates and Capital Group. New and existing investors also joined, including AE Investment Battery Ventures, Cambium Capital, BlackRock, QFO Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Vista Equity Partners and Volantis, among others. Ollama founder and CEO Jeff Morgan told TechCrunch that the popular open source AI tool has raised a $65 million Series B led by Theory Ventures. This round follows a previous $15 million Series A led by Benchmark's Peter Fenton. All told, the company has now raised $88 million. Ollama uh, which launched in 2023, helps devs run open weight AI models on their PCs, getting them up and running in minutes. It's been praised by developers across countless training sites, videos, blogs and social media posts. It has amassed 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub. Developers can also use Ollama to find models and access larger, more complex ones that it hosts on its Neo Cloud via several subscription tiers, from free to $100 a month. It also tracks usage based on GPU time, not token limits. If the mission to help developers more easily build on their PCs sounds vaguely familiar, um, well, it should. Morgan and his co founder Michael Xiang previously helped build Docker Desktop. They landed at Docker after it bought their previous startup, Kitematic. Docker makes containers that help cloud apps easy to move from cloud to cloud or from desktop to cloud, abstracting away all the pesky hardware configuration issues. So LLAMA essentially did for AI what Docker and Docker Desktop did for cloud, Morgan said. Open models started coming out in 2023, but they were really hard to use. They had been geared toward researchers at the time, not programmers, and as a result it was really hard to get them up and running. Three years after launching, Ollama is now used by over 8.9 million developers every month, sitting in 85% of the Fortune 500 and growing like crazy, all with only 14 employees, he says. That career experience is what drew Benchmark's Peter Fenton to lead its earlier round and join the board. Fenton told TechCrunch what Jeff and Michael built with Docker is being used by 10 million plus developers every day. The creative powers to create a product that goes to ubiquity for developers is extremely rare. Morgan and Fenton declined to discuss the startup's revenues and new valuation and But Morgan says that the proving point for Ollama as a business happened around January when OpenClaw became hot. That's when larger open models suddenly became able to do these agentic tasks like coding. Obviously we saw the explosion of the assistants like openclaw and this idea that open models can get real work done. Since then, the industry has been abuzz with the idea that paying users, particularly deep pocketed enterprises and fast grow application layer startups, will increasingly turn to more affordable open models, reserving their use of closed models like Anthropic for more of an as needed basis, Fenton said. I still think that this is the part that most of the debate gets wrong. It's not an either or. There will be plenty of business for both, he contends. However, every company with high inference expenses the cost of using the models as a vital existential project pushing them to move to open weight models, he says. There's plenty of evidence that such startups and enterprises are already turning to open models for their daily needs. That obviously bodes pretty well for Ollama's cloud business. But even more interesting, Ollama is another example of how AI is birthing a large new crop of open source projects that are turning into companies pursued by VCs. There are open source inference providers like Infract, maker of Vllm, or Radixarc, made by Sglang. There is openclaw and its alternatives like nanoclaw. There are even tiny startups building their own open models from scratch like rc. To be sure, not every Ollama fan has been happy that the company has been pursuing making a living. About a year ago, a bunch of blog and social media posts complained that its cloud business was drawing attention away from its beloved free project and cited Ollama as an example of the so called inshidification of dev tools, as the trend is called. But Morgan sees its cloud service as an evolution of its open source mission to help programmers find and easily use models. Those state of the art large open models are often too big to run on your own computer, so we said, hey, let's help find the compute for that, board member Fenton added, nothing has changed for the core product that's free on the desktop. There's zero change to the premise that this is the place you can discover and run local models. That's all for now. For the latest tech news go to techcrunch.com.

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