Fractile Raises $220M Series B for AI Inference Chips

London-based artificial intelligence startup Fractile has secured $220 million in a Series B funding round to hasten the development and delivery of its specialized chips for AI inference. The investment, announced this week, will expand teams across the United Kingdom, United States and Taiwan.

The round was led by Accel, Factorial Funds and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, 8VC and existing investors. Fractile, founded in 2022 by Oxford University-trained chip engineer Walter Goodwin, who serves as chief executive, focuses on hardware that runs pretrained AI models to produce real-time predictions, decisions or generative outputs more efficiently.

Goodwin identified inference speed and cost as the emerging bottleneck for advanced AI systems, which increasingly handle complex tasks requiring tens of millions of tokens, the basic units processed by large language models. Current chips generate around 40 tokens per second, meaning a 100 million-token output could take a month, according to the company. Fractile's novel architecture integrates memory within a standard server rack to minimize data movement between...