Fractile, a British startup that designs AI chips, has raised $720 million in a Series C round backed by Britain's Sovereign AI Fund.
Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint led the round. The British government said the startup is valued at more than 5 billion pounds and described the goal as giving the United Kingdom a greater stake in the hardware that will underpin its future economy.
Fractile builds chips aimed at cutting inference costs, meaning the expense of running AI models in production. It says it takes a full-stack approach, including a machine learning compiler to speed up large language models on its hardware, and calls itself a frontier AI company.
After a pivot, its design stacks DRAM on top of each chip, which the company hopes will get around the usual trade-off between memory and capacity. Demand for such chips is rising with agentic AI, which needs longer chains of tasks run on large models without losing speed.
Fractile competes with startups including Axelera, Etched and OLIX, and is among the best-funded makers of purpose-built AI chips.
Founder and CEO Walter Goodwin wrote on LinkedIn that there is still a lot of work ahead. He said the new funding should let the company ship its first chips and systems next year.
