Co-Founder & CEO of SambaNova
"SambaNova builds specialized AI chips and full-stack systems that let enterprises and governments run powerful AI models on their own private, secure infrastructure instead of the public cloud."
Rodrigo Liang
Co-Founder & CEO • SambaNova
Former Oracle VP Rodrigo Liang co-founded SambaNova in 2017 alongside Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Ré with a clear premise: traditional GPUs were never natively designed for massive AI dataflows.
By developing custom Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs) paired with tightly integrated software, SambaNova engineered a hardware platform capable of running complex reasoning, fine-tuning, and multi-model workloads at unprecedented speed and efficiency.
While public clouds dominate general consumer AI, Fortune 500 enterprises and sovereign governments faced strict data privacy, latency, and compliance constraints. SambaNova solved this with on-premises DataScale® systems and full-stack cloud offerings.
From tier-one global financial institutions like JPMorganChase deploying SN40 and SN50 platforms to sovereign AI initiatives worldwide, SambaNova established itself as the premier hardware standard for secure enterprise AI inference.
Months after strategic acquisition talks with Intel highlighted SambaNova's high-value chip IP, the company closed a milestone $1 billion Series F round led by General Atlantic, propelling its valuation to $11 billion.
With over $2.5 billion in total capital raised from BlackRock, Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Vista Equity, Rodrigo Liang continues to accelerate full-stack AI infrastructure deployments across global markets.
"The future of enterprise AI relies on high-velocity inference—running private, complex models on specialized dataflow hardware without surrendering control of your data."
— Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova
Solve the hard infrastructural challenges of enterprise security and raw inference velocity, and you become indispensable even against dominant incumbent hardware monopolies.
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