MatX, a startup that designs chips that support large-scale language models, has raised about $80 million in Series A less than a year after raising $25 million in a seed round, three people said. says a source.
The investment was led by Spark Capital, which valued the company at a pre-money valuation in the mid-$200 million range and an after-money valuation in the low $300 million range, people familiar with the deal told TechCrunch.
MatX was co-founded two years ago by Mike Gunter, who previously worked at Google designing the tech giant's AI chips, Tensor Process Units (TPUs), and Reiner Pope, who also developed AI from Google's TPU team. I did. software.
Gunter and Pope hope to alleviate the shortage of chips designed to handle AI workloads. They say the sweet spot for their chip is “at least” 7 billion AI workloads, and “ideally” 20 billion or more enablement parameters. According to MatX's website, the company boasts that its chips offer high performance at a more affordable price. The company says its chips are particularly good at scaling into large clusters, thanks to MatX's advanced interconnects, the communication paths that AI chips use to transfer information.
They told Bloomberg that the company's goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLM and delivering results than NVIDIA's GPUs. The Information reported last month that MatX was aiming to raise between $75 million and $100 million in this round.
The startup's seed round was announced in December last year, led by Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO and prominent AI angel investor. Friedman and Gross previously ran search and AI at Apple after Apple acquired his startup, Q, in 2013. Mr. Friedman and Mr. Gross frequently make angel investments together. Now, Gross has co-founded a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence, with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sastkevar.
Amid the AI boom and stratospheric demand for NVIDIA processors, companies that design chips are seeing increased interest from investors. Groq, a chip startup founded by former TPU engineer Jonathan Ross, nearly tripled to $2.8 billion in August from its previous valuation of $1 billion in April.
MatX and Spark did not respond to requests for comment.