Rodrigo Liang studied electrical engineering at Stanford, earning a BS and an MS. He then spent years designing chips at Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.
After Oracle bought Sun in 2010 he became a senior vice president running SPARC chip development. He left in 2017 to found SambaNova with Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Re.
The idea paired a dataflow chip with software that maps models onto it, sold as a service so customers did not have to run hardware. A $56 million Series A came in 2018, then $150 million in 2019 with Intel and Alphabet, and $250 million in 2020.
In April 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $676 million round at over $5 billion. In 2026 SambaNova unveiled its SN50 chip, raised $350 million in February, and reported a $1 billion Series F first close in July at $11 billion.