Fractile, a UK company building a groundbreaking new AI chip to deliver exponential performance improvements for AI models, has exited stealth and announced €13.8 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Kindred Capital, NATO Innovation Fund, and Oxford Science Enterprises, with participation from Cocoa and Inovia Capital, together with angel investors including Hermann Hauser (co-founder, Acorn, Amadeus Capital), Stan Boland (ex-Icera, NVIDIA, Element 14 and Five AI), and Amar Shah (co-founder, Wayve).
Founded in 2022 by 28-year-old artificial intelligence PhD, Walter Goodwin, Fractile has developed a radically different approach to the design of chips for AI inference that can deliver transformational improvements in performance for frontier AI models in deployment.
A Fractile system will achieve astonishing performance on AI model inference – initial targets are 100x faster and 10x cheaper – by using novel circuits to execute 99.99% of the operations needed to run model inference. A key aspect is a shift to in-memory compute, which removes the need to shuttle model parameters to and from processor chips, instead baking computational operations into memory directly.
Fractile is also unique in its approach to building these computational units, while still ensuring its technology is fully compatible with the leading-edge unmodified silicon foundry processes that all leading AI chips are built on.
Dr. Walter Goodwin, CEO and Founder of Fractile, said: “In today’s AI race, the limitations of existing hardware – nearly all of which is provided by a single company – represent the biggest barrier to better performance, reduced cost, and wider adoption. Fractile’s approach supercharges inference, delivering astonishing improvements in terms of speed and cost. This is more than just a speed-up – changing the performance point for inference allows us to explore completely new ways to use today’s leading AI models to solve the world’s most complex problems.”
Not only will Fractile provide vast speed and cost advantages, but it does so at a substantial power reduction. Power – sometimes measured in Tera Operations Per Second per Watt (TOPS/W) – is the biggest fundamental limitation when it comes to scaling up AI compute performance (see notes below for more detail). Fractile’s system is targeting 20x the TOPS/W of any other system visible to the company today. This allows for more users to be served in parallel per inference system, with – in the case of LLMs for example – more words per second returned to those users, thereby making it possible to serve many more users for the same cost.
John Cassidy, Partner at Kindred Capital, commented: “AI is evolving so rapidly that building hardware for it is akin to shooting at a moving target in the dark. It’s a major technical challenge but, with the AI inference chip market projected to be worth $91B by 2030, there’s also huge growth potential. Because Fractile’s team has a deep background in AI, the company has the depth of knowledge to understand how AI models are likely to evolve, and how to build hardware for the requirements of not just the next two years, but 5-10 years into the future. We’re excited to partner with Walter and the team on this journey.”
Andrea Traversone, Managing Partner at NATO Innovation Fund, added: “AI is one of the most transformational technologies of our time. Staying at the forefront of AI innovation is key to building a secure future and advancing defence, security and resilience across the Alliance. We are thrilled to be supporting Fractile, a company whose computing technology can enhance our collective AI capabilities by enabling computing power to run faster, more efficiently and sustainably.”
Fractile has already built a world-class team with senior hires from NVIDIA, ARM and Imagination, and has filed patents protecting key circuits and its unique approach to in-memory compute. The company is already in discussions with potential partners and expects to sign partnerships ahead of production of the company’s first commercial AI accelerator hardware. Fractile will use the funding to continue to grow its team and accelerate progress towards the company’s first product. To date, Fractile has raised $17.5m (£14m) in total funding.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/07/london-based-fractile-exits-stealth-with-e13-8-million-seed-to-develop-radical-new-ai-chip/
