UK’s Fractile raises $220m for inference ICs

Investors were: Accel, Factorial Funds, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Conviction, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, 8VC and Gigascale Capital, a fund from former Meta exec Mike Schroepfer.

In July 2024, Fractile raised $15 million in seed funding with investors including Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cocoa and Inovia Capital with angel investors including Pat Gelsinger, Hermann Hauser, Stan Boland, and Amar Shah (co-founder, Wayve) bringing its total funding to $17.5 million.

Fractile’s chips claim to be able to run LLMs  up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while lowering operational costs by 90%.

Fractile says it achieves this with an architecture it calls ‘memory-compute fusion’ which keeps data directly on the chip using SRAM instead of going off-chip to fetch it from memory.

Fractile has licensed the Andes AX45MPV RISC-V vector processor, combined with ACE (Andes Automated Custom Extension) and Andes Domain Library, and plans to incorporate the vector processing unit into their first generation data centre AI inference accelerator.

Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin (pictured), Fractile’s chips are not expected to be ready for datacentre deployment until 2027.

Fractile is said to be in talks with Anthropic about a chip supply deal.