What changed in September 2026
Benzinga reported on September 23, 2026, citing Forge Global's secondary-market data, that SambaNova's Forge Price had fallen 18.18% over the prior month to $66.92, implying a roughly $5.79 billion valuation, about 47% below the $127.10-per-share price investors paid in the company's July 2026 Series F round that valued SambaNova at $11 billion post-money. Secondary-market pricing reflects trading among existing private shareholders, not a new primary-round valuation.
CEO Rodrigo Liang reiterated the company's IPO stance in a September 14, 2026 CNBC interview, saying that going public next year is 'something we are thinking about' if it makes sense for the company, consistent with the 2027 target he first named at the Raise AI summit on July 8, 2026. Neither development changes SambaNova's filing status: no S-1 or F-1 has been filed on SEC EDGAR as of the latest site review.
A CEO who actually said the word 'IPO,' with a year attached
Most companies on this site have not filed anything and their executives have said nothing about a public listing. SambaNova is different: at the Raise AI summit in Paris on July 8, 2026, co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Liang told CNBC that the company is strongly considering an IPO in 2027, most likely in the United States. That is a stated target from the company's own chief executive, not a rumor -- but it is still a year away and not a filing.
Liang made the comment the same day SambaNova announced fresh financing: the first close of a $1 billion Series F round at an $11 billion post-money valuation, led by General Atlantic with participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, and Capital Group, alongside new and existing investors including funds managed by BlackRock, Intel Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Vista Equity Partners, and Battery Ventures, according to the company's own release. 'SambaNova's $11 billion valuation highlights the central role that fast inference now plays in the enterprise AI stack,' Liang said in that announcement.
From a $5.1 billion mark in 2021 to $11 billion five years later
SambaNova was founded in 2017 by Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Re together with Rodrigo Liang, a former Oracle executive, to build AI chip architecture as an alternative to general-purpose GPUs. Its last previously disclosed valuation was $5.1 billion, set by a Series D round in April 2021, according to Sacra's compiled funding data. The company had raised roughly $2.49 billion in total funding by mid-2026.
The path back to a headline valuation ran through 2026: SambaNova raised more than $350 million in a Series E round earlier in the year alongside a strategic hardware partnership with Intel, then unveiled its fifth-generation SN50 chip in February 2026, before the July Series F pushed the valuation to $11 billion. 'Inference has broken everything open,' Liang told CNBC, describing the standalone business as now able to 'move fast and drive the business across a broad range of sectors.'
A pivot to inference, proven out by a bank
SambaNova's growth story is built on a bet that AI infrastructure spending is shifting from training frontier models to running them in production -- inference -- an area SambaNova had reorganized its entire product line around by 2026, spanning SambaCloud (API access to open models), SambaStack (dedicated hosted or on-premise systems), and SambaManaged (turnkey inference for cloud and data-center operators). On July 8, 2026, the company announced that JPMorganChase had selected its SN40 and SN50 systems as an inference infrastructure partner for the bank's own AI workloads, calling the deployment a test of 'speed and security for on-prem inference' in demanding enterprise settings.
None of that is an IPO filing, and Liang's 2027 target remains an executive's stated intention rather than a confirmed date -- the kind of forward-looking comment that, unlike most companies tracked here, at least gives investors a specific year to watch rather than silence. A public S-1 on SEC EDGAR would be the first verifiable sign that SambaNova has actually begun the listing process it says it is considering; none exists as of the latest site review, and any specific 'SambaNova IPO date' before an actual filing remains speculation.