Situational Awareness, the hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has invested an additional $400 million in chip manufacturing startup Source Foundry, TechCrunch reported Sunday. Combined with an earlier $100 million investment, the fund's total stake now stands at $500 million, according to TechCrunch and CryptoBriefing.
Source Foundry was founded in July 2025 by Stanford researchers Abdulmalik Obaid and Joe Burg to make chip manufacturing faster and cheaper. The startup was recently valued at $5 billion, CryptoBriefing reported.
The new investment comes weeks after Situational Awareness nearly collapsed. At the end of July, sharp declines in the fund's publicly traded technology holdings triggered mounting collateral demands from banks, and the fund sold most of its public stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel, according to TechCrunch. It kept its Anthropic shares.
Aschenbrenner, who is in his mid-20s and had no prior trading experience, founded the fund in 2024.
For hardware founders, the deal is a reminder that capital for chip manufacturing tooling can come from unconventional places, in this case a public markets hedge fund rebuilding its balance sheet, not only from traditional venture funds.