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UK AI chip startup emerges from stealth with £12m to take on Nvidia

Fractile
Fractile founder and CEO Walter Goodwin. Image credit: Fractile

Fractile, a London-based AI chip startup looking to break up the dominance of Nvidia, has emerged from stealth with a £12m seed round.

Founded in 2022, Fractile claims the AI industry’s over-reliance on a small variety of chips is limiting its performance.

The company said the chips used by the largest AI companies are well-suited for training large language models but not for running live data through trained models, a process called inference.

“In today’s AI race, the limitations of existing hardware – nearly all of which is provided by a single company – represent the biggest barrier to better performance, reduced cost, and wider adoption,” said Dr Walter Goodwin, CEO and founder of Fractile.

“Changing the performance point for inference allows us to explore completely new ways to use today’s leading AI models to solve the world’s most complex problems.”

Fractile is hoping its approach, based on in-memory compute, means its chips will run as much as 100x faster at a lower financial and energy cost.

The investment round was co-led by Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund and Oxford Science Enterprise.

“AI is evolving so rapidly that building hardware for it is akin to shooting at a moving target in the dark,” said John Cassidy, a partner at Kindred Capital.

“Because Fractile’s team has a deep background in AI, the company has the depth of knowledge to understand how AI models are likely to evolve, and how to build hardware for the requirements of not just the next two years, but five to 10 years into the future.”

Additional funding came from Cocoa and Inovia Capital along with angel investors including Hermann Hauser, founder of Arm predecessor Acorn Computers, Wayve co-founder Amar Shah and former Nvidia executive Stan Boland.

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