British AI Inferencing Chip Startup Fractile Seeks Over $200M Funding, Valued at $1B

According to 1M AI News monitoring, FT cited sources as saying that London-based chip startup Fractile is in talks with venture capital firm Accel and other investors for a new funding round targeting over $200 million, valuing the company at around $1 billion.

Founded in 2022, Fractile is led by CEO Walter Goodwin, a Ph.D. holder from the University of Oxford, with a team comprising former engineers from NVIDIA, Imagination Technologies, and Graphcore. The company has previously raised about $15 million in seed funding, with investors including NATO Innovation Fund and former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. Unlike NVIDIA GPUs, Fractile's AI chip utilizes Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM), focusing on speed and cost optimization for AI inference scenarios through a combination of hardware and software. The company announced last month plans to invest £100 million over the next three years to build industrial hardware engineering facilities in London and Bristol.

The UK AI chip sector has seen a recent surge in fundraising activities: just a month ago, UK AI chip startup Olix raised $220 million.