Fractile raises more than £500m for AI chips with Sovereign AI and British Business Bank backing
The London and Bristol chip designer is now valued at more than £5 billion, according to the government, and plans to expand in Bristol.
By Daily Oracles News Team1 min read
Fractile, a chip designer with offices in London and Bristol, has raised more than £500 million in a Series C round that values it at over £5 billion, the government said on Wednesday. The government's Sovereign AI Venture Fund and the British Business Bank both invested.
Reuters put the figures higher, at $720 million for the round and $7 billion for the valuation, citing a person involved in the deal. Fractile had raised $220 million in May.
Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint led the round, according to Fractile's chief executive, Walter Goodwin. Google's venture arm CapitalG also invested.
The company is working on hardware for inference, the stage at which a trained AI model answers requests. It designs the chips, the software that runs on them and the machine learning methods as one package, aiming to make inference faster, cheaper and less power-hungry. The money will go on expanding in Bristol and scaling up its hardware in the UK.
The two state investors
The Sovereign AI Venture Fund normally puts £1 million to £10 million into early and growth-stage AI companies with a meaningful presence in the UK. The Chancellor added £140 million to Sovereign AI at the Budget, £60 million of it for the fund's investments and £80 million for an R&D procurement scheme.
The same Budget raised the British Business Bank's investment capacity by £5 billion to £30.6 billion. Its earlier AI investments include Wayve, Kraken Technologies, PhysicsX and PolyAI.
