Bristol-Based Artificial Intelligence Chipmaker Graphcore Raises $200 Million

By Noah Long ● Dec 20, 2018

Bristol, UK-based artificial intelligence chipmaker Graphcore has raised $200 million in Series D funding at a $1.7 billion valuation. With this funding round, Graphcore has now raised over $300 million to date.

This round of funding was led by existing investor Atomico and new investor Sofina. Merian Global Investors also joined as a major new investor. BMW iVentures and Microsoft also joined this round.

Graphcore is known for building a unique processor and software for AI and machine intelligence. This year, Graphcore started shipping its first products to early access customers and started generating revenue.

Now the company is ramping up high volume production to meet customer demand for its Intelligence Processor Unit (IPU) PCIe processor cards. Graphcore’s IPU is the first processor to be designed specifically for machine intelligence training and inference. And it delivers an increase in speed of 10x to 100x compared to comparable products.

Graphcore tripled the size of its team this year and the company opened new offices in London, Palo Alto, and Beijing. With this round of funding, Graphcore is going to execute on its product roadmap, accelerate scaling, and expand its footprint.

“Machine intelligence marks the start of a new age of computing which needs a radically different type of processor and software tools,” said Graphcore CEO and co-founder Nigel Toon in a statement. “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.”

This funding round was also supported with follow on investments from existing investors like Amadeus Capital Partners, Atomico, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, C4 Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, Pitango, and Sequoia Capital.

And some machine intelligence experts like Demis Hassabis (DeepMind co-founder), Zoubin Ghahramani (Cambridge University and Chief Scientist at Uber), Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley), Greg Brockman (OpenAI), Scott Grey (OpenAI), and Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI) previously invested in Graphcore.