Bristol, UK — Graphcore announced it has raised $222m of investment to help support the company’s global expansion and accelerate future IPU silicon, systems and software development.
The Series E funding round is led by Ontario Teachers’ Pensions Plan Board and adds funds managed by Fidelity International and Schroders as new investors. Also participating in this round are existing Graphcore investors, including Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit.
This investment brings the total funds raised by Graphcore to more than $710 million, with the company expecting to have over $440 million of cash on hand post-closing to support future growth. Graphcore is now valued at $2.77 billion, post-money.
The company said the new investors bring experience in disruptive technology and support for scale-up businesses and underscore the size of the market opportunity that Graphcore is addressing in data centre AI compute, as well as the maturity of the company’s product offerings.
“The confidence that they have in us comes from the competence we have demonstrated building our products and our business,” the company said. “We have created a technology that dramatically outperforms legacy processors such as GPUs, a powerful set of software tools that are tailored to the needs of AI developers, and a global sales operation that is bringing our products to market.”
2020 for Graphcore included the launch of our Mk2 IPU processor, the GC200 and data centre compute systems, the IPU-M2000 and IPU-POD64 for scale-out.
“Our first published benchmarks for the new systems show them clearly dominating the latest GPU-based setups,” the company said. “We also launched the Graphcore Partner Program. This impressive global network includes some of the world’s most respected distributors, resellers and OEMs. And, most recently, we launched Poplar v1.4, including full PyTorch support, ensuring that the most widely used frameworks are now simple to implement on the IPU and yield extremely impressive performance results.”
