Kate Park

AI chip maker SambaNova has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in a Series F funding round, just five months after its previous mega round. The funding comes despite earlier reports that Intel was exploring an acquisition of the company for approximately $1.6 billion, a figure now significantly below SambaNova's current valuation. The round underscores continued investor confidence in specialized AI chip makers competing in a crowded market.

Respond.io, a Malaysia-based startup using AI agents to handle customer inquiries, has raised $62.5 million in funding. The company operates on a per-conversation pricing model rather than per-seat licensing. The startup is now targeting acquisitions in North America and Europe to expand its market presence.

South Korean chip startup XCENA raised $135 million at a $570 million valuation, positioning itself around the thesis that memory bandwidth, not raw compute power, is the primary constraint limiting AI model performance. The funding reflects growing industry recognition that current GPU architectures may be optimized for the wrong bottleneck. XCENA's bet challenges the prevailing focus on compute-heavy solutions from established players like Nvidia.

Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI startup, raised $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, capitalizing on surging demand for open source AI models. The company achieved $200 million in annualized recurring revenue by April, driven by growth in paid subscriptions and API usage. The funding round reflects investor confidence in Moonshot's ability to compete in the increasingly crowded generative AI market, particularly in serving developers and enterprises seeking alternatives to Western AI providers.

Samsung has reached a $1 trillion market valuation following a surge in share price driven by strong demand for AI chips. The milestone makes Samsung only the second Asian company to achieve this valuation, after TSMC. The company's chip business has benefited from the broader AI infrastructure buildout as demand for processors accelerates across the industry.