AI chip startup Fractile is looking to raise $200 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to a report from the FT.

The UK-based company is reportedly in talks with Accel and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE) regarding the potential investment. OSE co-led Fractile’s $15m seed funding round in July 2024 alongside Kindred Capital and Nato Innovation Fund.

Fractile was founded in 2022 by Dr. Walter Goodwin, a then PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Robotics Institute. The company is developing chips that use in-memory compute, an approach that allows processors to run calculations directly in computer memory.

Speaking to DCD in 2024, Goodwin said that by taking this approach, Fractile hopes to create hardware that reduces power consumption and improves performance, all while allowing for faster and less expensive inference at scale.

Entrepreneur Stan Boland, a former Arm and Acorn Computers executive, is an investor in the company and listed as a director on Companies House – a UK government register of businesses, and in January 2025, former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said he had invested in Fractile.

Last month, the startup announced plans to invest £100 million ($132m) to bolster its UK operations over the next three years, with the expansion set to include the growth of its existing sites in London and Bristol, and the creation of a new hardware engineering facility in the latter city.

Fractile’s forthcoming Bristol site will also host a lab where companies can test software that has been designed to support future compute infrastructure, the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology said in a statement at the time.