With the money from Series E Round, the total funds raised by Graphcore total over $710 million. The company is expecting to have over $440 million of cash on hand post-closing to support future growth.
Graphcore, a UK-based semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning, has announced it raised as much as $222 million in a Series E funding round. The company called this funding a “pre-IPO” round as there are rumors that it may go public soon. Graphcore will use the money to expand globally and further accelerate future IPU silicon, systems, and software development.
The leading investor of the Graphcore Series E Funding Round was Ontario Teachers’ Pensions Plan Board. Existing Graphcore investors Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit took part as well. Besides, the participants included funds managed by Fidelity International and Schroders.
Olivia Steedman, senior managing director of Teachers’ Innovation Platform (TIP) at Ontario Teachers’, said:
“The market for purpose-built AI processors is expected to be significant in the coming years because of computing megatrends like cloud technology and 5G and increased AI adoption, and we believe Graphcore is poised to be a leader in this space.”
According to Graphcore, investors will share their experience in disruptive technology and support for scale-up businesses.
The company stated:
“Having the backing of such respected institutional investors says something very powerful about how the markets now view Graphcore.The confidence that they have in us comes from the competence we have demonstrated building our products and our business. We have created a technology that dramatically outperforms legacy processors such as GPUs, a powerful set of software tools that are tailored to the needs of AI developers, and a global sales operation that is bringing our products to market.”
With the money from Series E Round, the total funds raised by Graphcore total over $710 million. The company is expecting to have over $440 million of cash on hand post-closing to support future growth. Currently, its value is $2.77 billion, post-money.
Graphcore before Its Latest Funding: Review
Graphcore aims to make a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor. Since its founding in 2016, the company has been building a world where technology enhances human potential.
This year has been eventful for Graphcore. In February, the company raised $150 million in its Series D round that valued Graphcore at $1.95 billion. Later, Graphcore launched the Mk2 IPU processor, the GC200 and datacentre compute systems, the IPU-M2000, and IPU-POD64 for scale–out. Besides, the company introduced Graphcore Elite Partner Program — a global network of channel partners, serving its customers around the world.
Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon said:
“I view this year as a speed bump,” he said. “It has been challenging and we’ve realigned to speed things up.”
Recently, Graphcore launched Poplar v1.4, including full PyTorch support, to implement its graph toolchain in an easy to use and flexible software development environment.
In 2021, the company is planning to further work on artificial intelligence products. It also aims to drive the next advances in the industry.
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