AI Startup Graphcore Secures $30 Million
Graphcore announced it has raised $30 million in Series B financing. Nine investors participated in the round: Atomico Ventures, Amadeus Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, Pitango Venture Capital, C4 Ventures, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
Graphcore has designed a new processor specifically for machine learning. The company’s intelligence processing unit (IPU) accelerators and Poplar software framework together form the fastest and most flexible platform for current and future machine intelligence applications, lowering the cost of AI in the cloud and datacenter and improving performance and efficiency by 10 to 100 times. The system’s highly parallel computational resources, combined with graph software tools and libraries, allow researchers to explore machine intelligence across a much broader front than current solutions and help push deep learning rapidly toward broader useful artificial intelligence.
In its announcement, Graphcore said the new funding comes as the company prepares to ship its first intelligence processing unit hardware to customers later this year. It anticipates scaled-up production for enterprise datacenters and cloud environments in 2018.
