Positron AI, a leader in American-made semiconductor solutions for generative AI inference, has successfully closed a $51.6 million Series A funding round, bringing its total capital raised to over $75 million this year. The round was led by Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, and DFJ Growth, with additional participation from Flume Ventures (featuring tech luminary Scott McNealy), Resilience Reserve, 1517 Fund, and Unless. This oversubscribed round highlights strong investor confidence in Positron’s technology and vision.

The latest funding will fuel the continued deployment of Positron’s first-generation product, Atlas, while accelerating the development of next-generation products, including a highly anticipated custom silicon system set for 2026.

The Growing Demand for AI Infrastructure

The AI infrastructure market is rapidly expanding, with global tech companies expected to invest over $320 billion in AI technology by 2025. As demand for advanced AI solutions increases, enterprises face escalating costs, power limitations, and a shortage of NVIDIA GPUs. Positron’s innovative hardware solutions address these challenges, offering specialized systems optimized for generative AI, rather than relying on general-purpose GPUs.

“The early benefits of AI are coming at a very high cost – it is expensive and energy-intensive to train AI models and to deliver curated results, or inference, to end users. Improving the cost and energy efficiency of AI inference is where the greatest market opportunity lies, and this is where Positron is focused. By generating 3x more tokens per watt than existing GPUs, Positron multiplies the revenue potential of data centers. Positron’s innovative approach to AI inference chip and memory architecture removes existing bottlenecks on performance and democratizes access to the world’s information and knowledge.”

Randy Glein, co-founder and managing partner at DFJ Growth

Accelerating Innovation with New Funding

Positron AI plans to use the new capital to advance product development and scale its operations. The company will focus on expanding its hardware lineup, including the second-generation systems for even more powerful and efficient AI inference processing. Additionally, funds will be allocated towards hiring key personnel, further solidifying the company’s growth trajectory.

“We founded Positron to meet the demands of modern AI: aiming to run the frontier models at the lowest cost per token generation with the highest memory capacity of any chip available. Our highly optimized silicon and memory architecture allows for superintelligence to be run in a single system with our target of running up to 16-trillion-parameter models per system on models with tens of millions of tokens of context length or memory-intensive video generation models.”

Mitesh Agrawal, CEO of Positron AI

The Company’s Unique Approach

Founded in 2023 by CTO Thomas Sohmers and Chief Scientist Edward Kmett, Positron AI has quickly gained recognition for its innovative approach to AI infrastructure. The company’s first product, Atlas, delivers a performance-per-dollar improvement of 3.5x and reduces power consumption by up to 66% compared to NVIDIA’s H100. With a memory-optimized FPGA-based architecture, Atlas offers industry-leading bandwidth utilization, which allows it to support massive AI models with far fewer resources.

Positron’s custom-designed chips are fabricated in the United States, marking a significant step towards reshoring semiconductor manufacturing. The company’s commitment to American-made products positions it as a key player in the national AI infrastructure space.

“We have passed on the overwhelming majority of AI accelerator startups we have diligenced over the last 6 years as most of them were mounting frontal assaults on NVIDIA that were unlikely to succeed. Positron has carefully chosen a defensible niche in low-cost inference.”

Gavin Baker, managing partner and chief investment officer of Atreides Management

Building on Early Success

Positron’s product, Atlas, is already deployed in production environments, serving major enterprise clients, including Parasail (with SnapServe) and Cloudflare. With a growing customer base, the company is expanding its reach, focusing on delivering powerful, energy-efficient AI infrastructure that supports large-scale models with lower latency and reduced hardware overhead.

The Series A funding will also support the next-generation Titan system, which will feature Positron’s custom ‘Asimov’ silicon. Titan is designed to run 16-trillion-parameter models, scaling AI deployment capabilities further while maintaining low latency and high-throughput performance under heavy concurrency.

Positron’s commitment to delivering cost-effective, scalable, and energy-efficient AI infrastructure positions it as a unique player in the rapidly expanding market for next-gen AI systems.

Investors Behind the Vision

Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, DFJ Growth, Flume Ventures, Resilience Reserve, 1517 Fund, and Unless have all played significant roles in backing Positron’s ambitious vision for the future of AI infrastructure. These investors believe in Positron’s potential to transform the AI landscape with its energy-efficient, high-performance solutions tailored specifically to generative AI workloads.

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/positron-ai-raises-51-6m-to-advance-inference-hardware-for-ai-applications/
Originally Posted: Mon, 28 Jul 2025 16:23:24 +0000