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MatX, a chip design startup that supports large language models, has raised a Series A worth about $80 million, three sources say, 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 Gunther, who previously worked at Google designing Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the tech giant’s AI chips, and Rainer Poppe, who also came from Google’s TPU team, where he wrote AI programming.
Gunther and Pope hope to help alleviate the shortage of chips designed to handle AI workloads. They say the sweet spot for their chips is AI workloads of “at least” 7 billion, and “ideally” 20 billion or more active parameters. They boast that their chips offer high performance at affordable prices, according to MatX Website. The startup says its chips are particularly good at scaling to large clusters due to MatX’s advanced interconnection, also known as the communication paths that AI chips use to transfer information.
The husband told Bloomberg That is the company’s goal It is to make its processors 10 times better at LLM training and delivering results than NVIDIA’s GPUs. Information reported Last month, MatX was looking to raise between $75 million and $100 million for this round.
It was the seed round for the startup Announce Last December, led by high-profile AI angel investors, Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub; and Daniel Gross, who previously ran search and artificial intelligence operations at Apple after Apple bought his startup Cue in 2013. Friedman and Gross often invest together. Now, Gross has co-founded a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence, with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sostkever.
Companies designing chips have seen increased interest from investors amid the artificial intelligence boom and huge demand for NVIDIA processors. Groq, a 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 in April.
Matex and Spark did not respond to a request for comment.
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