With $720M round, Britain’s Fractile gets a leg up in the race for AI chips

Fractile, a British startup developing AI chips, has raised $720 million in a Series C funding round led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Redpoint. The funding values the company at over £5 billion, or possibly $7 billion. Fractile plans to use the funds to ship its first AI chips and systems next year, which will be designed to bypass the trade-off between memory and capacity through the use of stacked DRAM. The company's hardware design is a key differentiator, and it aims to be a full-stack player in the AI chip market, including a machine learning compiler to maximize the speed of large language models (LLMs).