- General
- December 18, 2018
- 5 minutes read
U.K. AI Chipmaker Graphcore Gets $200 Million Round at $1.7 Billion Valuation
Graphcore co-founders Simon Knowles (left) and Nigel Toon image : Graphcore U.K. based artificial intelligence chip manufacturer Graphcore has raised…
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| Graphcore co-founders Simon Knowles (left) and Nigel Toon
image : Graphcore
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U.K. based artificial intelligence chip manufacturer Graphcore has raised $200 million round led by existing investor Atomico and Sofina with participation from Amadeus Capital Partners, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, C4 Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, Pitango, Samsung and Sequoia Capital, Merian Global and also strategic new investors BMW and Microsoft.
This round values the 2 year old company at $1.7 billion and brings its total equity raised to over $300 million. Graphcore says it’ll make use of this capital to rapidly scale up by hiring lots of engineers at its Bristol headquarters and offices in London, Norway and Palo Alto. It’s also planning to open new offices in Beijing, China and in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
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| The Graphcore Rackscale IPU-POD
image : Graphcore
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Graphcore says it’s ramping up production and will also be adding to its sales, marketing, finance, legal and people teams. “Machine intelligence marks the start of a new age of computing which needs a radically different type of processor and software tools. This new, fast growing market creates the opportunity for Graphcore to build a major global technology company that can help innovators in AI achieve important breakthroughs.” Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon said.
“The versatility of Graphcore’s IPU – which supports multiple machine learning techniques with high efficiency – is well-suited for a wide variety of applications from intelligent voice assistants to self-driving vehicles. With the flexibility to use the same processor in both a data centre and a vehicle, Graphcore’s IPU also presents the possibility of reduction in development times and complexity.” BMW I Ventures principal Tobias Jahn added.
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| image : Graphcore |
Other notable Graphcore investors include Robert Bosch Venture Capital, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, Uber chief scientist Zoubin Ghahramani and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Scott Grey and Ilya Sutskever.
