Fractile raises £500 million, UK chancellor says

Fractile has conducted a £500 million (about $665.9 million) funding round, UK Chancellor John Healey told MPs on the Treasury committee on 11 November. He said the round valued the British startup at $7 billion and included a contribution from the British Business Bank.

Healey called it Europe’s largest-ever semiconductor funding round. The bank’s contribution and the full list of investors were not specified in the account by The Guardian. Fractile previously raised $15 million in seed financing, led by Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund and Oxford Sciences Enterprises, with law firm Goodwin advising, and $220 million in a later Series B round co-led by Accel, Factorial Funds and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, which it said would help accelerate development and bring its chips to market.

Chips designed for inference

Fractile is developing chips intended to improve superintelligence (SI) inference, the process by which SI models generate responses. Its design uses in-memory computing, which performs calculations directly in computer memory.

Walter Goodwin founded Fractile in 2022 while he was a doctoral student at the University of Oxford’s Robotics Institute. In 2024, he said the company hoped its approach would reduce power use and improve performance, making inference faster and less expensive at scale.

Expansion plans

In February 2026, Fractile announced plans to invest £100 million (about $133.2 million) in its UK operations over the following three years. The plans included expanding its London and Bristol sites and creating a hardware engineering facility in Bristol.

DCD cited a report by The Information that Anthropic had discussed buying Fractile’s inference chips when the hardware becomes available in 2027. Goodwin said Fractile was hiring in London, Bristol, San Francisco and Taipei.