Tenstorrent Raises $1.5 Billion at $6.2 Billion, Months After Takeover Talks

Tenstorrent announced a $1.5 billion Series E on Monday, Oct. 19, at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, according to The Next Web. That is 2.4 times the $2.6 billion that Bloomberg reported for the company's December 2024 round, and the sources read do not give a revenue figure to set it against.

Trace Capital, a new firm from Quiet Capital co-founder Ben Mahdavi, and Innovation X led, TechCrunch reported. Neither article says whether the $1.5 billion has fully closed or is partly committed, a distinction that decides whether the headline figure is cash in the bank.

What the round values

Round	Date	Raised	Valuation
Series D	December 2024	$693 million	$2.6 billion reported
Series E	Oct. 19, 2026	$1.5 billion	$6.2 billion post-money

If $6.2 billion includes the new money, the pre-money figure is about $4.7 billion, the arithmetic The Next Web also shows. The Globe and Mail describes the 2024 round as $693 million at a $2 billion valuation, which is consistent with $2.6 billion only if the $2 billion was pre-money. Revenue is the missing denominator: without it, the round cannot be expressed as a multiple of anything the company has reported.

The takeover talks that preceded it

Bloomberg reported on May 18 that Intel and Qualcomm had shown acquisition interest, and TechCrunch puts that interest at valuations of up to $5 billion. Chief executive Jim Keller told Bloomberg the company stayed independent after a May demonstration in which its Galaxy servers ran DeepSeek models, per The Next Web. He said Tenstorrent can compete on price and take orders too small for larger rivals.

Keller said in a statement: "We built one architecture and sell it at every size." The Next Web says the money goes to deploying Galaxy servers, which run open-weight models from large language models to video generation, and to AI and CPU designs that Samsung and LG license. Tenstorrent's processors use RISC-V, an open instruction-set architecture, and its software stack is published as open source. For the model side of that pitch, see how DeepSeek swapped V4.1-Flash-1017 behind its API name and Liquid's LFM2.5-24B-A2B, whose licence ends at $10 million in revenue.

Who is in and who is not

The Next Web lists Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Virtu Financial and XTX Markets. The Globe and Mail's list of participants includes 10 of those names but omits Tether, Virtu and XTX, and puts AFW Partners, Samsung Securities, Hyundai Motor Group, LG Electronics and Jeff Bezos under past investors.

Those past names include the two leads of the 2024 round, Samsung Securities and AFW Partners. The Globe and Mail also reports that Real Ventures sold its stake in 2025 and recovered its full $88 million third fund.

Tenstorrent was founded in Toronto about 10 years ago and moved to the United States in 2023 when Keller became chief executive. It is now based in Austin, Texas. The Globe and Mail counts 1,000 employees, 200 of them in Toronto, while The Next Web, citing Bloomberg, counts 1,150. The two figures may reflect different dates, and neither article says.

TechCrunch reported on Oct. 5 that Etched, another AI chip maker, fielded funding offers at $40 billion or more, a figure this article has not verified. The only customers named in The Next Web's account are the licensees Samsung and LG, and no Galaxy buyer appears in any of the four sources.