![]() Like it kind of put your both your employees and your investors in a bad spot. And then we thought: Then what? Down rounds like everybody else? That’s really hard on your company. ![]() We had a $1 billion valuation post funding round last time and we were offered more money at higher valuations. So they raised a lot of money, and they started spending a lot of money, and we did the opposite. Ljubisa Bajic, one of the co-founders of Tenstorrent, and I had long chats because when SambaNova and Cerebras had very sky high valuations. First, whenever there’s a big hype cycle, more people get investments than are properly supportable by the industry. What is it that Tenstorrent is doing can do that is different, better? I don’t expect you to spill all the architectural beans today, but what is driving you, and why? Using RISC-V to build an accelerator is the easy part of making an architectural choice. I know RISC-V is important, that it is the Linux of hardware and we’ve been waiting a long time for that moment. And everybody, as far as I can see, has a billion dollar problem to get to the next level. Graphcore and SambaNova are reasonable, Cerebras has waferscale and that is interesting. ![]() Nirvana Systems and Habana Labs both had what I think were good architectures, and Intel has not had huge success with either. It’s not like MapReduce and Yahoo Hadoop. It’s not like the Groq guys took the TPU idea, commercialized it, we’re done. None of it has worked to my satisfaction. TPM: Yeah, but we got we have got so many different companies already in the game. What we do know is that Keller thinks he has just the team to do it, and we had a chat with him about the Tenstorrent mission, one that we have been looking forward to. It is going to take money – and maybe a lot more money, and maybe not – to help companies cut the costs of AI training. ![]() To date, that will being the investment kitty to somewhere north of $384.5 million and will probably boost its valuation above $1.4 billion.Īll that money is interesting, and necessary to pay for the substantial amount of engineering work that the Tenstorrent team needs to do to create a line of commercial-grade RISC-V server processors and AI accelerators to match them and, more importantly, to take on the hegemony of the Nvidia GPU in AI training. In January of this year, Keller was tapped to replace Bajic as chief executive officer, and the company is today announcing that it will bring in somewhere between $120 million and $150 million in its Series D funding, with Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung Catalyst Fund leading the round and with prior investors Fidelity Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, Epiq Capital, Maverick Capital, and others kicking in dough. Keller was an angel investor and an advisor to the company from the get-go, and was brought in as chief technology officer in January 2021 after a stint at Intel’s server business, where he cleaned up some architectural and process messes as he did under a previous job at AMD. Tenstorrent was founded in 2016 by Ljubisa Bajic, Milos Trajkovic, and Ivan Hamer and is headquartered in Toronto. And that is precisely the plan with AI startup and now CPU maker Tenstorrent. When you combine the forces of open source and the wide and deep semiconductor experience of legendary chip architect Jim Keller, something interesting is bound to happen.
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