Graphcore in Bristol is world’s leading AI chip designer
A major Silicon Valley investor, Sequoia Capital, has identified Graphcore in Bristol as the world’s leading chip designer for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), backing the startup with $50m in a third round of funding to bring the total to over $110m.
Sequoia has previously backed companies such as Apple, Cisco, Google, NVIDIA and Microchip. “Machine intelligence will cause an explosion of new applications and services that will transform every industry. We believe Graphcore’s product architecture, team and early market interest make it the best positioned new entrant in this market,” said Matt Miller, the partner at Sequoia who will join the Graphcore board of directors.
The funding will be used to scale up production of its Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) chips and accelerator cards, building a community of developers around its Poplar ML software platform, driving Graphcore’s extended product roadmap, and investing in its Palo Alto-based US team to help support customers.
The company is planning to ship its first IPU devices to early access customers at the start of 2018, slightly later than its original plan of the end of 2017. Early benchmarking has shown 10x to 100x speed up in running AI algorithms and the ability to scale across many separate accelerator cards.
Source: Bristol startup identified as world’s leading AI chip designer -TechSPARK.co
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