Fractile raises $720 million in Series C funding

Fractile has raised $720 million in a Series C funding round, the British startup told Reuters. A person involved in the deal separately said the round valued the company at $7 billion.

The London- and Bristol-based company is developing chips for superintelligence (SI) inference, the process in which models generate responses. Fractile says its technology can provide faster performance while reducing energy use and costs.

Private and public investors

Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint led the round. Other participants included Google’s venture arm CapitalG, BlackRock, DST Global, Elad Gil, Balderton and SV Angel, as well as the UK government’s Sovereign AI fund and the British Business Bank.

Sovereign AI said it does not comment on individual investment amounts because they are commercially sensitive.

SI Minister Kanishka Narayan said Britain needs to build more of the technology powering SI to support public services and jobs, and retain more of the resulting industrial capability and economic rewards at home. The government said the public investors' support would provide long-term capital to scale Fractile’s hardware technology in the UK and reduce reliance on overseas technology and supply chains.

From funding to hardware

Walter Goodwin co-founded Fractile with Yuhang Song in 2022; he earned an Oxford PhD studying general-purpose robotic intelligence. The company emerged from stealth in July 2024 with a £12 million (about $16 million) seed round co-led by Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund and Oxford Science Enterprises, and later raised $220 million in Series B funding. The October Series C filings came five months after the Series B.

On 30 October, Tech Funding News said Fractile had not shipped a production chip or said how it would use the Series C proceeds. The earlier Series B was set aside for initial chips and systems and hiring in London, Bristol, San Francisco and Taipei.

Tech Funding News, citing Bloomberg and unnamed sources, reported an initial agreement for Fractile to sell Anthropic about $250 million in chips, with both parties interested in expanding it. The hardware is not expected until 2027. In February, Fractile pledged £100 million over three years for UK expansion, including a hardware engineering facility in Bristol.

Fractile plans to launch its first commercial chip in 2027. The company also expects to deploy chips in data centers that year.