Groq, a leader in fast AI inference, announced it has secured a $640 million Series D round at a valuation of $2.8 billion. The funding round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners with participation from existing and new investors, including Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, and strategic investors, including Cisco Investments, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
This unique and vertically integrated Groq AI inference platform has generated skyrocketing demand from developers seeking exceptional speed.
Groq also announced that Stuart Pann, formerly a senior executive from HP and Intel, joined its leadership team as Chief Operating Officer. Plus, Groq gained the expertise of its newest technical advisor, Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
Groq has quickly grown to over 360,000 developers building on GroqCloud. They are creating AI applications on openly-available models such as Llama 3.1 from Meta, Whisper Large V3 from OpenAI, Gemma from Google, and Mixtral from Mistral. And Groq will use the funding to scale the capacity of its tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and features to GroqCloud.
As Gen AI applications move from training to deployment, developers and enterprises require an inference strategy that meets the user and market need for speed. And developers flocking to Groq are creating a wide range of new and creative AI applications and models, driven by Groq instant speed.
To meet its developer and enterprise demand, Groq will deploy over 108,000 LPUs manufactured by GlobalFoundries by the end of the first quarter of 2025, the largest AI inference compute deployment of any non-hyperscaler.
Mohsen Moazami (President of International at Groq and former leader of Emerging Markets at Cisco) is leading commercial efforts with enterprises and partners including Aramco Digital and Earth Wind & Power to build out AI compute centers globally. And this will ensure developers have access to Groq technology regardless of their location.
Groq LPU AI inference technology is architected from the ground up with a software-first design for meeting the unique characteristics and needs of AI. And this approach has given Groq an advantage to bring new models to developers quickly, at instant speed. The funding will enable Groq to accelerate the next two generations of LPU.
Morgan Stanley served as exclusive Placement Agent to Groq on the transaction.
KEY QUOTES:
“The market for AI compute is meaningful and Groq’s vertically integrated solution is well positioned to meet this opportunity. We look forward to supporting Groq as they scale to meet demand and accelerate their innovation further.”
– Samir Menon, Managing Director, BlackRock Private Equity Partners
“Samsung Catalyst Fund is excited to support Groq. We are highly impressed by Groq’s disruptive compute architecture and their software-first approach. Groq’s record-breaking speed and near-instant Generative AI inference performance leads the market.”
– Marco Chisari, Head of Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center and EVP of Samsung Electronics
“You can’t power AI without inference compute. We intend to make the resources available so that anyone can create cutting-edge AI products, not just the largest tech companies. This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud. Training AI models is solved, now it’s time to deploy these models so the world can use them. Having secured twice the funding sought, we now plan to significantly expand our talent density. We’re the team enabling hundreds of thousands of developers to build on open models and – we’re hiring.”
– Jonathan Ross, CEO and Founder of Groq
“I am delighted to be at Groq at this pivotal moment. We have the technology, the talent, and the market position to rapidly scale our capacity and deliver inference deployment economics for developers as well as for Groq.”
– Stuart Pann, Chief Operating Officer at Groq
“Aramco Digital is partnering with Groq to build one of the largest AI Inference-as-a-Service compute infrastructure in the MENA region. Our close collaboration with Groq is transformational for both domestic and global AI demand.”
– Tareq Amin, Chief Executive Officer, Aramco Digital
