A UK company aiming to build a chip to deliver exponential performance improvements for AI models has raised £160 million funding.
Fractile, which in 2024 exited stealth with £12m in seed funding, was founded in 2022 by artificial intelligence PhD Walter Goodwin.
It has developed a radically different approach to the design of chips for AI inference that it claims can deliver transformational improvements in performance for frontier AI models in deployment.
The fresh round was led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures and 8VC, as well as existing backers.
The seed round featured Kindred Capital, NATO Innovation Fund, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cocoa and Inovia Capital, Hermann Hauser (co-founder, Acorn, Amadeus Capital), Stan Boland (ex-Icera, NVIDIA, Element 14 and Five AI), and Amar Shah (co-founder, Wayve).
Fractile is headquartered in London. Earlier this year it revealed plans to invest £100m to build a hardware engineering facility in Bristol, as well as a testing lab for software. The firm also has bases in San Francisco and Taiwan.
“We bet everything on the logical conclusion: that the only way to truly unlock this latent value, to make speed viable at scale, was to radically re-invent the hardware that we run our frontier AI models on. Ever since, we have been building chips and systems that tackle this problem,” Goodwin wrote in a blog post.
“Since then, raw AI capability has already reached the point where time from query to output is the key limit to frontier capabilities.
“Today’s LLMs are already producing up to 100 million tokens in pursuit of tackling our hardest problems. At the ~40 tokens per second or so at which these models tend to run on existing chips, a single output of this length takes a month to complete.
“The technical and economic limits on inference speed, above all from memory bandwidth that has failed to scale on current architectures, are what is constraining progress. To compress that month into a day, we will need to generate output at ~1,200 tokens per second, while handling the complexity and capacity challenges of operating large models at very long contexts. This is exactly the problem Fractile has been building from the ground up to tackle.
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“However, what is most exciting about the hardware moonshot is not accelerating the workloads of today, but rather the entirely new workloads that we will enable. Compressing a month of work into a day, a weekend of lab computation into a coffee break, will make all that work happen radically faster, but it will also make far more ambitious AI use cases economically viable.
“Agentic coding is only the start of the story. The defining work of the 21st Century will be marked by the engine of inference delivering immense and diffuse chains of intellectual inquiry, in drug discovery, in software engineering, in materials discovery, in any field where humanity will benefit from sheer intellectual work to resolve complex problems.
“As with any technological revolution, those who drive this progress fastest, who push the frontier furthest, will capture the greatest share of the value. The workloads that push to the limits of the current frontier are already transformational.
“The ones that lie beyond that frontier, that we are about to break open, will stretch our imaginations and redefine the entire economy. Fractile is seeking to increase the clock speed of global progress, one chip at a time.”