What sets Tenstorrent apart
Tenstorrent is led by Jim Keller, the chip architect previously at Apple, AMD, Tesla, and Intel, who became President and CEO in 2023 after swapping roles with co-founder Ljubisa Bajic, a move Forbes covered at the time.
The company closed over $693 million in Series D funding on 2 December 2024 at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, with Samsung, LG, and Hyundai among the strategic investors. Its Wormhole and Blackhole chip lines are built on RISC-V cores rather than a closed proprietary instruction set, an architectural choice The Register's technical coverage has detailed as distinct from competitors' closed designs. For an early-career engineer weighing offers against public incumbents, this is a late-stage but still-private company where the equity is illiquid and the architecture is closer to defining a new open ecosystem than optimizing within an established one, a different bet than joining a public chipmaker.