UK chip startup Fractile has raised $220 million in a Series B funding round.
In a statement, the company said the round – which was co-led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund – would help accelerate the development and commercialization of its forthcoming AI inference chips.
The round also saw participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, and 8VC. Former Arm and Acorn Computers executive, Stan Boland, has previously invested in Fractile, and in January 2025, former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said he had invested in the startup.
Fractile was founded in 2022 by Dr. Walter Goodwin, a then PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Robotics Institute. The company is developing chips that use in-memory compute, an approach that allows processors to run calculations directly in computer memory.
Speaking to DCD in 2024, Goodwin said that by taking this approach, Fractile hopes to create hardware that reduces power consumption and improves performance, all while allowing for faster and less expensive inference at scale.
In February 2026, the startup announced plans to invest £100 million ($135m) to bolster its UK operations over the next three years, with the expansion set to include the growth of its existing sites in London and Bristol, and the creation of a new hardware engineering facility in the latter city.
Earlier this month, a report from The Information claimed that generative AI company Anthropic had held discussions with Fractile regarding the purchase of the startup’s inference chips when the hardware becomes available in 2027.
“Since founding, we’ve been working across the full stack, from foundational AI research to foundry process innovation to chip micro-architecture, to aggressively chase the most promising solutions and develop systems that break the trade-off curve, reject the inference pareto frontier of cost-versus-latency, and chart a course to changing what we can do with the world’s best AI models,” wrote Goodwin in a blog post announcing the fundraise.
At the end of the post, Goodwin said Fractile is currently hiring for roles in London and Bristol in the UK, San Francisco in the US, and Taipei in Taiwan.