Britain's Fractile raised a $720 million Series C led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint, with backing from the UK's Sovereign AI Fund. According to the UK government the valuation is "over £5 billion", and according to the Financial Times and a Reuters source it is about $7 billion. The round puts it alongside Axelera, Etched and OLIX among the best-funded startups in purpose-built AI chips.
The company develops inference chips, for running models in production, together with a compiler meant to speed up how language models run on them. After a pivot, its design is built on DRAM stacked directly on top of each chip, aiming to get around the trade-off between memory speed and capacity, a problem that has grown with AI agents running long chains of tasks.
CEO Walter Goodwin wrote that the funding will let the company ship its first chips and systems next year, and that there is "still a lot of work ahead". Fractile has not yet sold products.