MatX, an AI chip startup founded by former Google hardware engineers, announced that it has raised a $500 million Series B funding round to complete development and scale manufacturing of its next-generation processor, the MatX One. The funding, one of the largest early-stage raises in the semiconductor industry, was led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP, with participation from Spark Capital, Triatomic Capital, Harpoon Ventures, and technology founders including Andrej Karpathy and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. Strategic hardware partners Alchip and Marvell also took part in the round.
MatX said the Series B financing will allow the company to wrap up MatX One development and scale manufacturing, targeting chip tapeout within a year. The startup’s team has grown to about 100 engineers working on system-level challenges ranging from compiler scheduling to hardware-level numerical precision.
The MatX One chip is designed with a splittable systolic array architecture that the company says delivers higher throughput than any announced system while also achieving low latency through a hybrid SRAM-first design combined with high-bandwidth memory for long-context support. According to MatX, this performance combination is aimed at giving large language models increased speed and efficiency for customers.
The company said it was founded on the belief that the best LLM processor should be designed from first principles with a deep understanding of evolving model needs. MatX acknowledged that it deprioritized support for smaller models and ease of programming in order to focus squarely on maximizing performance for large-scale models.
With the new capital, MatX is positioning itself as a challenger to incumbent AI chip providers by building specialized hardware tailored specifically for large-scale LLM workloads.
KEY QUOTES
“We’re building an LLM chip that delivers much higher throughput than any other chip while also achieving the lowest latency. We call it the MatX One.”
Reiner Pope, CEO and Co-Founder of MatX
