Fractile Raises $720M Series C With UK Sovereign AI Fund
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Fractile, a British startup, has raised $720 million to build chips for running AI models. The company says the new money should let it ship its first chips and systems next year.
Memory stacked on the processor
The design is the core of the pitch. After a pivot, Fractile builds around DRAM, the most common type of RAM. It stacks that memory on top of each chip. The company hopes stacking lets it avoid choosing between memory and capacity.
Memory matters because a chip is only as fast as the data it can reach. A large model needs a lot of memory, and fast memory is usually small. Fractile is betting that stacking breaks that bind.
The bind has grown tighter with agentic AI. Companies now ask large models to complete longer chains of tasks without losing speed. Compute is struggling to keep up.
Where Fractile sits among chip startups
Fractile now ranks among the top-funded startups working on purpose-built AI chips, alongside Axelera, Etched and OLIX. Such chips are one of several ways to cut the cost of inference, meaning the work of running AI models once they are deployed.
The company also wants more than hardware. It also builds the software side: a machine learning compiler meant to speed up large language models on its chips. Fractile frames itself as a frontier AI company, and the round was priced on that basis.
Backers and valuation
Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint led the Series C. A Series C is a later-stage round, usually raised once a company has moved past its first product ideas. Britain's Sovereign AI Fund also backed it.
The government said the aim is "ensuring the U.K. has a greater stake in the hardware that will underpin its future economy." It put the valuation above £5 billion.
The Financial Times and a Reuters source reported a possible figure of $7 billion.
CEO Walter Goodwin wrote on LinkedIn that "there is still a lot of work ahead."
Source: TechCrunch