AI start-up Groq, announced on Monday (5 August), that it had secured $640m in a new funding round led by BlackRock.
With participation from Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI and Samsung Catalyst Fund, the funding round surpassed expectations, from the initial $300m, taking its valuation to $2.8bn.
Smarter leaders trust GlobalData
The high level of investment demonstrates continued enthusiasm for investment in AI chips and a motivation to back potential competitors to NVIDIA, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
In a statement shared by Groq, the company attributes the firm’s vertically integrated Groq AI inference platform for generating “skyrocketing demand”.
Plans for funding
The semiconductor start-up has been building fast AI inference technology since its inception in 2016. Its LPU inference technology is focussed on delivering rapid compute speed and energy efficiency.
Groq’s CEO and founder, Jonathan Ross, explained that Groq intends to make advanced AI chip production widely available, not just for the largest tech companies.
How well do you really know your competitors?
Access the most comprehensive Company Profiles on the market, powered by GlobalData. Save hours of research. Gain competitive edge.
Thank you!
Your download email will arrive shortly
Not ready to buy yet? Download a free sample
We are confident about the unique quality of our Company Profiles. However, we want you to make the most beneficial decision for your business, so we offer a free sample that you can download by submitting the below form
By GlobalDataHe added: “This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud. Training AI models is solved, now it’s time to deploy these models so the world can use them. “
The funding will be used to scale Groq’s tokens-as-a-service offering and add new models to GroqCloud alongside boosting the firms’ recruitment to help build more open models.
Along with the announcement of the funding, the firm also announced a new chief operating officer, Stuart Pann, who formerly was a senior executive at HP and intel, as well as a new technical advisor, Yann LeCun who is VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
The AI Chip Market
As AI becomes widely adopted, businesses are looking for innovation to provide faster processing.
Samir Menon, managing director at BlackRock Private Equity Partners, also commented that the firm is looking forward to “supporting Groq as they scale to meet demand and accelerate their innovation further”.
Despite this optimism and clear enthusiasm for the AI chip market, GlobalData’s recent thematic report on the AI chip industry highlighted that there were still significant issues facing the industry as a whole, including a skill shortage and energy demand.
Investment interest in Groq, however, might begin to address concerns of the concentrations of power in a few chip companies, by allow smaller companies to begin competing more in the market.
