AI chip and infrastructure company SambaNova raised $1 billion in a Series F at an $11 billion post-money valuation led by General Atlantic — with Battery Ventures, BlackRock, Intel Capital, T. Rowe Price, and Vista among the syndicate — while cybersecurity firm Keyfactor raised $1 billion from Summit Partners, Insight Partners, and Sixth Street Growth, per Crunchbase News' weekly roundup published July 10, 2026. The two tied rounds led a week in which AI companies took five of the ten largest U.S. financings, per the report's theme.
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What Else Was in the Week?
Oratomic, a South Pasadena startup building neutral-atom quantum hardware, raised a $300 million Series A co-led by Arch Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Spark Capital across a sixteen-investor syndicate including Bezos Expeditions — one of the largest quantum Series A rounds on record. Below it: Quaise Energy's $134 million Series B for millimeter-wave geothermal drilling, Prime Intellect's $130 million Series A for distributed AI compute, Gauntlet's $125 million from SBI Group for DeFi risk management, Norm AI's $120 million Series C at a reported $1.2 billion valuation for translating laws into compliance software, Venus Aerospace's $91 million for hypersonic propulsion, EDX Markets' $76 million, and Fore Biotherapeutics' $67.4 million precision-oncology round.
What Does It Change for Founders?
The week's two billion-dollar rounds landed in different capital systems — SambaNova in growth venture, Keyfactor in private equity — and that pairing is the signal worth reading. Private equity's willingness to write billion-dollar checks to mature software companies deepens the exit-and-funding menu for founders: PE is now a realistic alternative to an IPO or a strategic sale for profitable, boring-on-purpose infrastructure businesses, and a founder deciding whether to raise another venture round can put a PE recapitalization on the same whiteboard. SambaNova's round, meanwhile, extends the year's hardware-inference pattern: investors keep paying premium valuations for the silicon and systems that run AI in production, with an $11 billion post-money on roughly $2.5 billion previously raised. And Oratomic's $300 million Series A sets the early-stage benchmark for quantum — a sector where the same dynamic that played out in AI (infrastructure first, applications later) is beginning to price in.
The takeaway for founders: a week with twin $1 billion rounds — one venture, one private equity — shows both capital systems bidding hard for infrastructure assets at once; founders in security, compute, and deep tech should be talking to both.
For more context, read Baseten and AppsFlyer Head a $4.5 Billion AI-Led Funding Week.
For more context, read ramp $750 million funding.
For more context, read July Set a Record With 14 Billion-Dollar Funding Rounds.