Tenstorrent raises $1.5 billion as its valuation more than doubles to $6.2 billion

Tenstorrent has closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, the AI chip company announced on October 19. The round more than doubles the valuation it set in December 2024, according to Reuters and TechCrunch.

Two rounds, 22 months apart

In December 2024, Tenstorrent closed more than $693 million in a Series D at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners. Bloomberg put the post-money figure at about $2.6 billion, the number TechCrunch uses as its comparison point. The new round raised more than twice as much money and lands at $6.2 billion post-money.

TechCrunch reports the raise comes five months after Intel and Qualcomm reportedly showed acquisition interest at valuations of up to $5 billion. Keller told Bloomberg, per TechCrunch, that the company chose to stay independent and raise more after showing its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models.

Who wrote the checks

Trace Capital, a firm Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi launched this year, led the round with Innovation X. The other participants named by Tenstorrent are Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Brett Barna, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets.

For crypto readers, the name to spot is Tether Investments, the investment arm of the USDT stablecoin issuer. It sits on the same list as Fidelity, Morgan Stanley and T. Rowe Price.

Where the money goes

Tenstorrent says it will use the capital to deploy its Galaxy servers at scale (each one combines dozens of its AI chips, per Reuters), keep serving open-weight models for LLMs and video generation, and develop the AI and CPU designs it licenses to companies building their own chips. Its chips are based on RISC-V, an open-source architecture, and it licenses its TT-Ascalon CPU and Tensix AI cores to chip designers including Samsung and LG.

"We built one architecture and sell it at every size," Keller said in the announcement. Keller, Tenstorrent's CEO, was the architect behind Apple's A4 and A5, AMD's Zen and Tesla's Full Self-Driving chip. The company has offices in Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo and Bangalore.