SambaNova Systems, a Silicon Valley start-up developing AI-driven Dataflow-as-a-Service, announced the appointment of Poonacha Kongetira as Vice President of Hardware.
Kongetira hails from Google where he led a team of engineers developing custom silicon accelerators for machine learning, video transcode, and datacenter infrastructure. He also led NVIDIA’s Bangalore design center for mobile and GPU chips with a team of more than 800 engineers. Kongetira was an early member of the leadership team developing the first Niagara processor at Afara which was acquired by Sun Microsystems and eventually Oracle.
“I am thrilled to join SambaNova working with the best in the industry and to rejoin the familiar faces of a talented team which led the transition from single to multicore processors with Niagara,” said Poonacha Kongetira, VP of Hardware at SambaNova. “Armed with SambaNova’s Reconfigurable Dataflow Architecture and Dataflow-as-a-Service, we have the unique opportunity to establish this unrivaled technology as the industry standard for machine learning and scientific applications just like we did with Niagara and apply the vision of machine learning and AI for enterprises.”
SambaNova raises $676 million for its AI platform
SambaNova Systems, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, announced $676 million in Series D funding for its software, hardware and services to run AI applications.
SambaNova’s flagship offering is Dataflow-as-a-Service (DaaS), a subscription-based, extensible AI services platform designed to jump-start enterprise-level AI initiatives, augmenting organizations’ AI capabilities and accelerating the work of existing data centers, allowing the organization to focus on its business objectives instead of infrastructure.
At the core of DaaS is SambaNova’s DataScale, an integrated software and hardware systems platform with optimized algorithms and next-generation processors delivering unmatched capabilities and efficiency across applications for training, inference, data analytics, and high-performance computing. SambaNova’s software-defined-hardware approach has set world records in AI performance, accuracy, scale, and ease of use.
The funding round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and included additional new investors Temasek and GIC, plus existing backers including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Intel Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Walden International and WRVI. This Series D brings SambaNova’s total funding to more than $1 billion and rockets its valuation to more than $5 billion.
SambaNova says it is working “to shatter the computational limits of AI hardware and software currently on the market — all while making AI solutions for private and public sectors more accessible.”
“We’re here to revolutionize the AI market, and this round greatly accelerates that mission,” said Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova co-founder and CEO. “Traditional CPU and GPU architectures have reached their computational limits. To truly unleash AI’s potential to solve humanity’s greatest technology challenges, a new approach is needed. We’ve figured out that approach, and it’s exciting to see a wealth of prudent investors validate that.”
Stanford Professors Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré, along with Liang, founded SambaNova in 2017 and came out of stealth in December 2020. Olukotun is known as the “father of the multi-core processor” and the leader of the Stanford Hydra Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) research project. Ré is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, and is affiliated with the Statistical Machine Learning Group, Pervasive Parallelism Lab, and Stanford AI Lab.
