AI Fund I Backed Positron AI At Seed Before the World Took Notice—Now Featured in WSJ and Backed by Top Funds $51.6M Series A

At Banyan Ventures, we invested in Positron AI at the seed stage, before most of the world had heard their name. When the opportunity came to double down, we did—co-investing alongside top-tier firms in the company’s $51.6M oversubscribed Series A.

Now Positron is earning national recognition, featured in the Wall Street Journal as a leading solution to AI’s energy crisis.

The Series A was led by Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, and DFJ Growth, with participation from Flume Ventures (with Scott McNealy), Resilience Reserve, 1517 Fund, Unless, and Banyan Ventures.

We believed in Positron’s vision early—and we're proud to continue backing them as they redefine the future of AI inference infrastructure.

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Why we backed Positron at Seed

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AI inference is the largest driver of cost and energy usage in modern AI systems. Positron’s FPGA-based Atlas platform is already delivering:

• 3.5x better performance per dollar
• 66% lower power consumption
• Full compatibility with Hugging Face models and OpenAI-compatible APIs
• Already deployed by Cloudflare, Parasail, and multiple enterprise clients

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The company’s next-generation Titan platform, powered by Positron’s custom Asimov ASIC, is targeting 16 trillion-parameter models with up to 2TB of high-speed memory—solving the power, memory, and scalability bottlenecks of legacy infrastructure.

📣 As featured in the Wall Street Journal, Positron’s approach is a direct response to the AI energy crisis. Cloudflare’s Head of Hardware, Andrew Wee, said:

“I can’t wrap my head around it... The projected power demands of AI are unsustainable.” Which is why Cloudflare is now testing Positron chips.

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In the same article, CEO Mitesh Agrawal adds:

“We founded Positron to meet the demands of modern AI: aiming to run the frontier models at the lowest cost per token generation with the highest memory capacity of any chip available.”

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🔗 Read the WSJ feature:
The New Chips Designed to Solve AI’s Energy Problem (WSJ)

🔗 Positron Series A:
Positron AI Secures $51.6 Million in Oversubscribed Series A to Accelerate Inference-Optimized Hardware

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Summary

At Banyan Ventures, we invest early in the infrastructure powering the AI-native future. Positron AI represents that thesis in action: a capital-efficient, deeply technical team solving a fundamental bottleneck—energy-efficient inference at scale. From seed to Series A, we’ve been proud to partner with Positron as they transition from a bold idea to a nationally recognized category leader, now backed by top-tier firms and featured in the Wall Street Journal. We’re just getting started.