AI chip startup Positron has acquired $23.5 million in funding on Tuesday to scale production of its U.S.-made artificial intelligence chips. Investors who contributed to the funding include Elon Musk ventures’ backer Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, Flume Ventures, and Resilience Reserve.
Headquartered in Reno, Nevada, Positron’s AI chips are known for its manufacturing of low-power, high-performance chips, claiming to be a step ahead of industry-leading Nvidia’s chips on the market. At present, Positron’s Atlas systems are said to achieve 3.5 times better performance per dollar and 3.5 times greater power efficiency than Nvidia H100 GPUs for inference.
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Leveraging a memory-optimized architecture that hits greater than 93% bandwidth utilization when compared to 10% to 30% for GPUs, Positron’s FPGA-powered servers support trillion-parameter models while offering plug-and-play compatibility with Hugging Face and OpenAI APIs.
These systems deliver 70% faster inference at 66% lower power consumption than H100/H200 setups, slashing data center CapEx by 50%. Besides these specs, Positron has also gained attention for being entirely designed, manufactured, and assembled in the U.S., in a time of global economic and political tensions.
With tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI seeking alternatives to Nvidia’s market dominance, Positron has emerged as a strong contender in the next era of AI hardware.
“Investing in domestic AI hardware is a strategic imperative when it comes to securing America’s global AI posture,” said Scott McNealy, Operating Partner at Flume Ventures.
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“Positron is proving that world-class AI compute doesn’t have to come from overseas, and we’re excited to support their mission to make the U.S. a leader in AI hardware manufacturing,” he added.
Positron is currently led by its CEO Mitesh Agarwal. A former software consultant and financial analyst, Agarwal has previously served as an executive at Lambda, the AI unicorn he helped grow from $500,000 to $500 million in annualized revenue, while securing over $1 billion in funding. He is now working alongside Positron co-founders, Thomas Sohmers and Edward Kmett, to drive the company’s mission of delivering domestically made AI compute solutions.