Fractile

AI Chips · Semiconductors · AI Infrastructure

Funding

Fractile reportedly nears $700M raise at $6.5B valuation for AI chips

A UK taxpayer-backed fund is buying into the round, betting public money on a chipmaker that hasn't shipped product yet.

• Fractile is in talks to raise about $700M at a roughly $6.5B valuation, with Lightspeed and Redpoint co-leading and Thrive Capital also investing, the Telegraph reported.
• Founded in 2022 by Oxford robotics researcher Walter Goodwin, Fractile builds AI inference chips that place SRAM memory directly next to compute, a different architecture than Nvidia's GPUs.
• UK Companies House filings show Fractile allotted about £577.4M ($774M) of new Series C shares between September 9 and October 23, with the top tranche priced at £1,452.35 a share.
• The top Series C price is 5.2 times the £278.37 per share that Series B investors paid in May, when Fractile's $220M raise valued it at about $1B.
• The UK's Sovereign AI Fund, seeded with £500M of public money and recently boosted by £60M from the Budget, is joining the round; it typically writes checks of £1M to £10M.
• Fractile has an initial deal to supply about $250M of inference chips to Anthropic, but deployment in data centers isn't expected until 2027 and no chips have shipped yet.
• A government fund taking a stake in an unshipped chip startup at a sixfold valuation jump shows how far AI infrastructure optimism is outrunning product delivery, even as some investors grow wary of the broader spending surge.