Cerebras Systems has closed a $250 million Series F round that values the AI-chip startup at $2.5 billion, according to techcrunch.com. The financing, announced Thursday, was led by existing backer Eclipse Ventures and brings total equity raised to more than $715 million.
Eclipse, which first invested in Cerebras’ 2016 seed round, doubled down after the company booked more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue from cloud and enterprise customers, techcrunch.com reports. The round also drew participation from new investors including Altimeter Capital and Coatue Management. Founder and CEO Andrew Feldman said the capital was raised in a single tranche over the past eight weeks, with Eclipse partner Lior Susan taking a board seat.
The deal arrives as demand surges for wafer-scale processors that can train trillion-parameter models without the interconnect bottlenecks of GPU clusters. Cerebras’ CS-3 systems are already deployed at pharmaceutical giants such as GSK and national labs including Argonne, according to techcrunch.com. At a $2.5 billion valuation, the company now trades at roughly 25× forward revenue, comparable to SambaNova’s 2021 round but below the 40× multiple that Groq commanded earlier this year.
Feldman told techcrunch.com the new funds will finance a second-generation Arizona fabrication line set to begin pilot runs in Q1 2025 and will triple the size of the company’s software engineering team by year-end. Investors expect the next trigger for valuation to be the launch of Cerebras’ inference cloud service, slated for public availability in October, which management projects will push annual revenue past $300 million by 2026.