US big-hitting VCs Lightspeed and Alphabet's CapitalG have backed UK chip startup Fractile in a £500m-plus funding round, which values the startup at over £5bn, the UK government said today in a press release.
The UK Nvidia challenger, based in Bristol and London, designs chips for AI inference, the process of running an AI model.
Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile’s architecture keeps data directly on the chip, unlike standard chips that must constantly shuttle data between the processor and separate memory modules. It says this method can run LLMs up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while lowering operational costs by 90 per cent. Fractile's specialised chips are set to be ready for data centre deployment next year.
The lead investors in the Series C round, some of which has previously been reported, are Thrive Capital, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lightspeed, and Redpoint. The UK’s Sovereign AI fund, the British Business Bank, Shopify, Balderton, Dragoneer and Blackrock also featured in the round, which Fractile said amounted to around £540m.
