Ljubisa Bajic turned up late. He was carrying a prototype in what he later called a big, brown ragged box, and the man waiting for him at Tesla was his old boss, Jim Keller.
Bajic did not start out as a chip person in Toronto. He grew up in Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, and finished high school in Moscow, drawn there by its mathematics programmes. In 1985 he moved to Canada to study electrical engineering, then went to Silicon Valley to design processors. He worked at VLSI Technology and Nvidia, and in 2014 joined AMD, where he worked under Keller.
Bajic joked to Fortune, on a Zoom call from that same basement, that he had become used to low light.
Then Keller left for Tesla. Bajic stayed with an itch of his own: a chip built for machine learning. Keller had told him that if he came up with something cool, he would fund it. The box held Bajic's answer. Keller was impressed, and he told Fortune it would be funny if Bajic and a couple of others lived in a basement for a year building the thing.
They did. Tenstorrent was founded in 2016 with Milos Trajkovic and Ivan Hamer, and for about a year the team worked below ground before moving into offices in Toronto. Bajic joked to Fortune, on a Zoom call from that same basement, that he had become used to low light.
What almost nobody outside chip circles knew is how long the angel stayed an angel. Keller invested early, and only joined as president and CTO in 2021, the same year Tenstorrent raised more than US$200M from Fidelity and others at a US$1B valuation. The first chip, Grayskull, slipped because the team chose to build client software before shipping it.
Then the roles flipped. In January 2023 Keller became CEO and Bajic became president and CTO, with Bajic saying he wanted full focus on the technology. Four months later he stepped back from daily duties, staying on the board and as an advisor. The company gave no reason, only that he would pursue new projects. By then Tenstorrent had nearly 300 employees and two chip generations taped out.
The money kept coming. In December 2024 a Series D of more than US$693M, led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners with Bezos Expeditions in the round, valued it at about US$2.6B after the money went in. Total funding was close to US$1B, and by October 2026 the company was valued at about US$6.2B.
A founder can take one thing from the box. Bajic did not pitch a deck to his old boss. He carried the thing itself into the room, late, and let a person who knew chips decide.