A chip designer built around the open RISC-V instruction set has closed one of the year’s largest venture rounds, more than doubling its private market value in under two years.
Tenstorrent said on Oct 19 that it raised $1.5B in a Series E led by Trace Capital and Innovation X. The post-money valuation reached $6.2B, against $2.6B when it closed a roughly $700M round in late 2024.
Investors included ARK Invest, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Virtu Financial and Tether Investments, alongside venture firms Agostinelli Group and XTX Markets. Cadence Ventures, the investment arm of the design-tool supplier, also participated.
Servers first, licenses later
The Toronto-founded, US-based company plans to spend the money on volume manufacturing of its Galaxy servers, on next-generation hardware, and on AI and CPU intellectual property it licenses to other chipmakers. It has already begun shipping Galaxy systems commercially.
Chief executive Jim Keller has argued that one architecture scaled across sizes beats separate designs for each tier, and that open software stacks let customers customise more cheaply than closed GPU platforms allow.
Axios reported that Intel and Qualcomm both courted Tenstorrent earlier this year and were turned down, with the company choosing to stay independent. Tenstorrent declined to comment on that speculation.
The round lands in a difficult stretch for chip equities. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had its longest losing streak since 2008 the week before, and investors have grown wary of the debt some AI builders are taking on. A private raise at a higher mark reads as a counter-signal to that mood.
Tenstorrent still competes against Nvidia from a much smaller base. Its pitch is cost and openness rather than raw throughput, aimed at groups wanting an inference stack they control end to end.
