With $720M round, Britain’s Fractile gets a leg up in the race for AI chips

Fractile, a British startup developing AI chips, has raised a $720 million Series C backed by Britain's Sovereign AI Fund, with the British government stating the valuation was "over £5 billion." The round was led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint, and Fractile pairs its hardware with a machine learning compiler in a full-stack approach. Its design stacks DRAM on top of each chip to try to bypass the usual memory-capacity tradeoff, and CEO Walter Goodwin said the funding will let the startup ship its first chips and systems next year.