Benchmark raises $225M in special funds to double down on Cerebras

This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced that it raised $1 cardinal successful caller superior astatine a valuation of $23 billion — a astir threefold summation from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had reached conscionable six months earlier.

While the circular was led by Tiger Global, a immense portion of the caller superior came from 1 of the company’s earliest backers: Benchmark Capital. The salient Silicon Valley steadfast invested astatine slightest $225 cardinal successful Cerebras’ latest round, according to a idiosyncratic acquainted with the deal.

Benchmark archetypal stake connected 10-year-old Cerebras erstwhile it led the startup’s $27 cardinal Series A successful 2016. Since Benchmark deliberately keeps its funds under $450 million, the steadfast raised two separate vehicles, some called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ according to regulatory filings. According to the idiosyncratic acquainted with the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to money the Cerebras investment.

Benchmark declined to comment.

What sets Cerebras isolated is the sheer carnal standard of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship spot announced successful 2024, measures astir 8.5 inches connected each broadside and packs 4 trillion transistors into a azygous portion of silicon. To enactment that successful perspective, the spot is manufactured from astir an full 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular discs that service arsenic the instauration for each semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments chopped from these wafers; Cerebras alternatively uses astir the full circle.

This architecture delivers 900,000 specialized cores moving successful parallel, allowing the strategy to process AI calculations without shuffling information betwixt aggregate abstracted chips (a large bottleneck successful accepted GPU clusters). The institution says the plan enables AI inference tasks to tally much than 20 times faster than competing systems.

The backing comes arsenic Cerebras, based successful Sunnyvale, Calif., gains momentum successful the AI infrastructure race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year statement worthy much than $10 billion to supply 750 megawatts of computing powerfulness to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends done 2028, aims to assistance OpenAI present faster effect times for analyzable AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is besides an capitalist successful Cerebras.)

Cerebras claims its systems, built with its proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.

The company’s way to going nationalist has been analyzable by its narration with G42, a UAE-based AI steadfast that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ gross arsenic of the archetypal fractional of 2024. G42’s humanities ties to Chinese exertion companies triggered a nationalist information reappraisal by the Committee connected Foreign Investment successful the United States, bumping backmost Cerebras’ archetypal IPO plans and adjacent prompting the outfit to retreat an earlier filing successful aboriginal 2025. By precocious past year, G42 had been removed from Cerebras’ capitalist list, clearing the mode for a caller IPO attempt.

Cerebras is present preparing for a nationalist debut successful the 2nd 4th of 2026, according to Reuters.