AI chip startup MatX, founded by Google alums, is raising a $300M+ Series A round, sources say.
MatX, a startup designing chips that support large-scale language models, has raised an $80 million Series A round, three sources said, less than a year after raising its $25 million seed round.
Spark Capital led the investment, valuing the company at a pre-money valuation in the mid-$200 million range and a post-money valuation in the low $300 million range, a person who reviewed the deal told TechCrunch.
MatX was founded two years ago by Mike Gunter, who previously worked at Google on the design of Tensor Process Units (TPUs), the tech giant’s AI chips, and Reiner Pope, also from Google’s TPU team. , where he wrote AI. the software.
Gunter and Pope hope to help alleviate the shortage of chips designed to handle AI workloads. They say the sweet spot for their chips is an AI load of “at least” 7 billion, and “should” be 20 billion or more activated parameters. And they pride themselves on the fact that their chips deliver high performance at affordable prices, according to the MatX website. The startup says its chips are great for scaling large clusters thanks to advanced MatX communication, which is the communication mechanism used by AI chips to transfer information.
The two told Bloomberg that the company’s goal is to make its processors ten times better at training LLMs and delivering results than NVIDIA’s GPU. The Information reported last month that MatX was looking to raise between $75 million and $100 million.
The seed round of the startup was announced last December led by top AI angel investors Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub; and Daniel Gross, who once ran search and AI at Apple after Apple bought his startup, Cue, in 2013. Friedman and Gross often invest together. Now, Gross has founded a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence, with former OpenAI scientist Ilya Sustkever.
Companies that design chips have seen increased interest from investors amid the AI boom and stratospheric demand for NVIDIA processors. Groq, the chip startup founded by former TPU engineer Jonathan Ross, saw its valuation nearly triple to $2.8 billion in August from its previous valuation of $1 billion set in April.
MatX and Spark did not respond to a request for comment.
