Fractile raises $220 million from Accel and Founders Fund to enhance AI chip performance, targeting Nvidia's dominance.
Fractile, a London-based AI chip startup, has successfully raised $220 million in a funding round led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund. Founded in 2022 by Oxford researcher Walter Goodwin, Fractile is focused on developing specialized chips designed to significantly accelerate AI inference processes.
The recent funding will support Fractile's ambitions to deliver its first systems to customers while expanding operations in the UK, US, and Taiwan. The funding round also saw participation from investors such as Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, and 8VC.
Fractile is addressing the limitations of current AI hardware, which struggles to efficiently handle long-context workloads due to insufficient memory bandwidth scaling. The company aims to enhance inference speed, increasing current performance from 40 tokens per second to approximately 1,200 tokens per second, thereby reducing the time taken for complex computations.
Entering a competitive market dominated by NVIDIA, Fractile is differentiating itself by focusing on ultra-fast inference for large-scale reasoning and long-context computing. This approach opens opportunities in various fields, including drug discovery, software engineering, and materials science.
The company is actively hiring in London, Bristol, San Francisco, and Taipei as it prepares for global expansion and commercial deployment. The capital raised will facilitate the development and launch of Fractile’s first chips and systems for customer use.