Positron raises $230M Series B at $1B for inference silicon

The round was announced on February 4, 2026, and was oversubscribed. It was co-led by ARENA Private Wealth, Jump Trading and Unless. Qatar Investment Authority, Arm and Helena also took part, and existing backers Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management returned. That differs from the current blurb, which names Valor and Jump as the leads. Total funding now exceeds $300M, and the money is earmarked for Asimov, the next-generation chip. Positron targets tape-out in late 2026 and production in early 2027. It claims 5x more tokens per watt than Nvidia's Rubin GPU and 2,304 GB of memory per device, against 384 GB for Rubin. These are company claims, not independent benchmarks. Positron's shipping product is Atlas, an inference system made in the US. Jump's path from customer to co-lead investor suggests early demand from latency-sensitive trading workloads. The valuation has since moved sharply. Positron's press page lists a September 2026 Series C of $875M at a $5B valuation. For AI founders, the signal is that power and memory limits, not raw compute, are drawing investor money in inference hardware. Teams with large context windows or heavy serving costs may soon have alternatives to Nvidia. Those alternatives are unproven at volume until Asimov ships.