Two $1B rounds in one week: AI chips and cybersecurity lead

Key Takeaways

• SambaNova closed a $1B Series F at $11B valuation for AI chip infrastructure
• Keyfactor raised $1B for machine identity and certificate management software
• Five of the week's ten largest rounds went to AI companies

Two billion-dollar funding rounds closed in the same week, both targeting the infrastructure layer beneath the AI boom. SambaNova, which builds custom AI chips for enterprise workloads, raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. Keyfactor, a machine identity management company, matched that figure with a private equity round of its own. Together, they signal where investors expect the next wave of value to accrue: not in the AI applications themselves, but in the plumbing that makes them work.

What did SambaNova and Keyfactor raise?

SambaNova's $1 billion Series F was led by General Atlantic. The round attracted a sprawling investor list that reads like a who's who of institutional capital: Battery Ventures, BlackRock, Capital Group, Intel Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, T. Rowe Price, and Vista Equity Partners. The Palo Alto company has now raised nearly $2.5 billion total, according to Crunchbase data.

Keyfactor's $1 billion came from a private equity consortium led by Summit Partners, with Insight Partners and Sixth Street Growth also participating. The Independence, Ohio-based company provides software for managing digital certificates, encryption keys, and connected devices. It has now raised $1.21 billion lifetime.

The coincidence is worth noting. One company builds the chips enterprises need to run AI models. The other secures the machine-to-machine communication those models generate. They sit on opposite ends of the same infrastructure stack.

Why is machine identity suddenly a billion-dollar market?

Keyfactor's raise reflects a security problem that has grown faster than most companies' ability to address it. Machine identities, the certificates and keys that authenticate everything from IoT sensors to cloud workloads, now outnumber human identities by a factor of 45 to 1 in the average enterprise, according to industry estimates. Every API call, every microservice, every container needs its own credentials.

PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) management used to be a backwater concern, something IT teams handled with spreadsheets. The explosion of connected devices and AI systems has made it a board-level risk. A single expired certificate can take down a major service. A compromised key can expose an entire network.

Summit Partners bet $1 billion that enterprises will pay to solve this problem with software rather than headcount.

How is SambaNova positioning against NVIDIA?

SambaNova builds custom silicon designed specifically for AI training and inference. The pitch is vertical integration: chips, software, and enterprise services in one stack. It competes with NVIDIA's dominant GPUs, but also with a growing field of alternative AI chip makers including Cerebras, Groq, and startups emerging from stealth.

The $11 billion valuation suggests investors believe there is room for multiple winners in AI infrastructure. NVIDIA's market cap exceeds $3 trillion. The pie is large enough that capturing even a small slice justifies a unicorn valuation.

What makes SambaNova's round notable is the institutional composition. BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, and Capital Group are not typical Series F investors. Their participation signals that late-stage AI infrastructure deals are attracting crossover capital that usually waits for public markets.

What else made the top 10?

Five of the week's ten largest rounds went to AI companies. Beyond SambaNova, the list included Prime Intellect ($130 million for distributed AI training) and Norm AI ($120 million for regulatory compliance automation at a $1.2 billion valuation). Prime Intellect's backers included Box CEO Aaron Levie, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, a roster that suggests Silicon Valley insiders see value in decentralized compute infrastructure.

Outside AI, quantum computing startup Oratomic pulled in a $300 million Series A led by Arch Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Spark Capital. Jeff Bezos participated through Bezos Expeditions. Quaise Energy raised $134 million for millimeter-wave drilling technology aimed at unlocking deep geothermal power. Gauntlet secured $125 million from SBI Group for DeFi risk management software.

Venus Aerospace closed a $91 million Series B for hypersonic propulsion technology, continuing the steady flow of capital into aerospace and defense.

What pattern should founders notice?

The week's deals cluster around infrastructure, not applications. Investors funded the chips that run AI models, the software that secures machine communication, the hardware that might one day run quantum algorithms, and the drilling technology that could provide carbon-free power to data centers. The common thread is enabling technology that sits below the application layer.

For founders, the implication is that infrastructure plays still command premium valuations, but the bar keeps rising. Keyfactor has been building for years. SambaNova has raised nearly $2.5 billion across multiple rounds. These are not seed-stage bets on unproven technology. They are late-stage investments in companies with established products and enterprise customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did SambaNova raise in its Series F?

SambaNova raised $1 billion at an $11 billion post-money valuation, led by General Atlantic with participation from BlackRock, Intel Capital, T. Rowe Price, and others.

What does Keyfactor do?

Keyfactor provides machine identity management software that helps enterprises secure digital certificates, encryption keys, and connected devices across their infrastructure.

How many of the top 10 funding rounds this week went to AI companies?

Five of the ten largest announced rounds went to AI-related companies, including SambaNova, Prime Intellect, and Norm AI.

What was the largest non-AI deal of the week?

Keyfactor's $1 billion cybersecurity round tied for largest overall. For non-AI and non-cyber, Oratomic's $300 million quantum computing Series A was the biggest.

Source: Crunchbase News / Marlize van Romburgh