This week’s capital continued to concentrate at the base of the AI stack. The single largest check went into dedicated power generation for hyperscale data centers, a category that has moved from niche financing story to first-order infrastructure priority. Enterprise IT decision makers should note the widening barbell: multi-billion-dollar bets on compute plumbing at one end, and mid-sized rounds funding compliance and developer tooling at the other.
Joulent
Round: Strategic Minority Investment | Sector: Data Center Power / IT Infrastructure
Houston-based Joulent, formed by Engine No. 1, secured a $1.75 billion strategic minority investment from National Grid Ventures for a 35 percent stake. Proceeds will support Project Kilby, a 2.67-gigawatt co-located natural gas facility being built with Chevron to power a planned Microsoft data center campus in West Texas under a 20-year power purchase agreement. The transaction confirms that dedicated, contracted power delivery has become the new bottleneck financing story in enterprise IT, sitting upstream of the GPU supply chain everyone else is chasing.
SambaNova
Round: Series F | Sector: Semiconductors / AI Inference Hardware
AI chip company SambaNova raised $1 billion in a late-stage round led by General Atlantic at an $11 billion post-money valuation, with participation from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price, Capital Group, BlackRock funds, Intel Capital, and the Qatar Investment Authority. The capital extends SambaNova’s runway to compete in enterprise inference silicon at a moment when large buyers are actively benchmarking alternatives to Nvidia GPUs. Placement of a sovereign investor alongside deep-pocketed public-market managers signals that inference hardware is now viewed as strategic infrastructure by non-traditional buyers.
Groq
Round: Growth | Sector: Cloud / AI Inference
Groq closed $650 million in new growth capital led by Disruptive and Infinitum to expand its AI inference cloud toward a 200-megawatt footprint by 2027. The round follows Groq’s late-2025 licensing agreement with Nvidia and the incorporation of Groq’s LPU technology into Nvidia’s LPX platform, an unusual arrangement that turns a would-be competitor into a distribution channel. Enterprise IT teams evaluating inference cost curves should track how quickly Groq’s dedicated capacity translates into published pricing.
Norm AI
Round: Series C | Sector: Compliance / Enterprise AI
Norm AI raised $120 million in a Series C led by Khosla Ventures at a $1.2 billion valuation, with participation from Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Craft Ventures, Coatue, Vanguard, New York Life, TIAA, and Fenwick LLP. The company builds regulatory AI agents that automate compliance workflows for regulated enterprises, positioning itself as the compliance layer alongside emerging categories such as communications governance and post-quantum readiness. The unusual mix of financial, legal, and venture backers suggests strong intent-to-purchase signal from the buyers this category needs to convert.
Ollama
Round: Series B | Sector: DevOps / AI Developer Tools
Ollama raised $65 million in a Series B led by Theory Ventures, with participation from Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, Pace Capital, and others, bringing total funding to $88 million. The open-source project has grown to roughly nine million developers and now operates a paid cloud service that hosts larger open-weight models such as Nemotron, GLM, DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax, with day-one distribution deals covering Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm silicon. For enterprise DevOps and platform teams standardizing on open models, Ollama has quietly become one of the default local-and-hybrid inference runtimes.
The Weekly Funding Pulse tracks the most significant IT infrastructure, cloud, semiconductor, networking, and ITSM funding rounds each week. Coverage is curated for enterprise IT professionals and decision-makers.
