With $720M round, Britain’s Fractile gets a leg up in the race for AI chips

British AI chip startup Fractile has raised $720 million in a Series C led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint, with backing from the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund. The investment gives the company a stronger position in the race to develop specialist chips that could make running AI models faster and less costly, and reflects the government’s aim to secure a greater UK stake in AI hardware.

Fractile combines chip design with a machine-learning compiler intended to speed up large language models. After a pivot, its hardware uses DRAM stacked on each chip to address limits on memory capacity and speed, which are increasingly relevant for AI systems that perform long sequences of tasks. The government put the company’s valuation at over £5 billion; reports cited in the article suggest it may be around $7 billion. CEO Walter Goodwin said the funding would help Fractile ship its first chips and systems next year.