Key facts
- Fractile raised a $720 million Series C, with Britain's Sovereign AI Fund among the backers, the government said.
- The British government said the round valued Fractile at over £5 billion.
- The Financial Times and a Reuters source put the valuation at about $7 billion.
- Fractile designs chips with DRAM stacked on top of each chip, aiming to bypass the usual memory and capacity tradeoff.
- Fractile also builds a machine learning compiler to speed how LLMs run on its chips.
- CEO Walter Goodwin said the funding will let Fractile ship its first chips and systems next year.
Fractile, a British startup developing AI chips, has raised a $720 million Series C, with Britain's Sovereign AI Fund among the backers, the British government said. The round was led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint.
The government said the round valued Fractile at over £5 billion. The Financial Times and a Reuters source put the figure at about $7 billion.
Fractile designs its chips with DRAM, the most common type of RAM, stacked on top of each chip, an approach it hopes will bypass the usual tradeoff between memory and capacity. The company also builds a machine learning compiler to maximize the speed at which LLMs run on its chips, part of a full-stack approach it frames as making it a frontier AI company.
Alongside Axelera, Etched and OLIX, the round places Fractile among the top-funded startup players in the race for purpose-built AI chips, which are being explored as a way to reduce the cost of inference, or running demanding AI models in production.
In a LinkedIn post, CEO Walter Goodwin wrote that "there is still a lot of work ahead" for the company and that the new funding will enable the startup to "ship [its] first chips and systems next year."