Fractile reaches $7 billion valuation with new AI chip funding
The London startup raised $720 million as it develops a memory-focused chip design, but its claimed performance gains remain unproven in production.
A $720 million Series C investment has valued London chip designer Fractile at $7 billion, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the transaction. The four-year-old startup is developing technology intended to improve AI performance by addressing limits on memory bandwidth.
Redpoint, Lightspeed, Founders Fund and Thrive Capital jointly led the financing. Backers also included BlackRock, Alphabet’s CapitalG, the British Business Bank and the UK’s Sovereign AI fund. An earlier fundraising in May brought in around $220 million and valued Fractile at roughly $1 billion.
Fractile proposes stacking logic and custom DRAM in three dimensions. According to the company, the design would outperform high-bandwidth memory on bandwidth while preserving the capacity needed for large models that handle long context windows. Founder Walter Goodwin says inference—the generation of responses to users—could become up to 10 times faster.
No production chip has yet demonstrated those gains, and Fractile has no commercial product available. Its technology and prototypes underpin the valuation.
Separately, the Financial Times reported interest from Anthropic in purchasing Fractile chips as an early customer, citing people familiar with those discussions. Alongside its London base, Fractile operates offices in Taiwan and the US and is pursuing a global market.
