companies

Tenstorrent

AI-chip company led by veteran chip architect Jim Keller, building RISC-V based accelerators and an open software stack as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs.

Tenstorrent was founded in Toronto in 2016 by Ljubisa Bajic, a former chip architect at AMD and Nvidia, around the idea that AI compute needed hardware and software built specifically for it rather than adapted from graphics processors. Jim Keller, known for his work on AMD's Zen architecture, Apple's early mobile chips and Tesla's self-driving hardware, joined Tenstorrent in 2021 as president and CTO and became CEO in early 2023, with Bajic moving into the CTO role. The company has shipped several chip generations, from its early Grayskull architecture through Wormhole and the more recent Blackhole chips, alongside TT-Metalium, an open-source, low-level software stack that gives developers direct control over its Tensix core hardware in a manner comparable to, but more open than, Nvidia's CUDA. Tenstorrent has raised roughly $1.18 billion in total funding across multiple rounds, including a $693 million Series D in December 2024 at a valuation of over $2 billion, from investors including Hyundai, Samsung and Fidelity. Tenstorrent positions itself as a more open, RISC-V-based alternative to Nvidia for both AI training and inference workloads, appealing to developers and hardware buyers wary of being locked into a single, proprietary GPU software ecosystem, particularly during periods of Nvidia GPU supply constraints.

Founded

2016

Headquarters

North York, Canada

Sector

hardware