Amid the gloom of the technology industry meltdown on Wall Street, AI inference chip startup Groq announced today it has secured a $640 million Series D round at a valuation of $2.8 billion.
Groq also announced that Stuart Pann, formerly a senior executive at HP and Intel, joined its leadership team as COO. And Groq announced the addition of its newest technical advisor, Yann LeCun, VP and chief AI scientist at Meta.
The round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners with participation from both existing and new investors including Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, and strategic investors including Cisco Investments, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. The unique, vertically integrated Groq AI inference platform has generated skyrocketing demand from developers seeking exceptional speed.
“We are highly impressed by Groq’s disruptive compute architecture and their software-first approach. Groq’s record-breaking speed and near-instant Generative AI inference performance leads the market,” said Marco Chisari, Head of Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center and EVP of Samsung Electronics.
“You can’t power AI without inference compute,” said Jonathan Ross, CEO and Founder of Groq. “We intend to make the resources available so that anyone can create cutting-edge AI products, not just the largest tech companies. This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud. Training AI models is solved, now it’s time to deploy these models so the world can use them. Having secured twice the funding sought, we now plan to significantly expand our talent density. We’re the team enabling hundreds of thousands of developers to build on open models and – we’re hiring.”
Groq said it has grown to over 360,000 developers building on GroqCloud, creating AI applications on openly-available models such as Llama 3.1 from Meta, Whisper Large V3 from OpenAI, Gemma from Google, and Mixtral from Mistral.
Groq said it will use the funding to scale the capacity of its tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and features to GroqCloud.
As Gen AI applications move from training to deployment, developers and enterprises require an inference strategy that meets the user and market need for speed, according to Groq. To meet its developer and enterprise demand, the company will deploy over 108,000 Groq AI LPUs manufactured by GlobalFoundries by the end of Q1 2025, the largest AI inference compute deployment of any non-hyperscaler.
Mohsen Moazami, President of International at Groq, former leader of Emerging Markets at Cisco, is leading commercial efforts with enterprises and partners including Aramco Digital and Earth Wind & Power to build out AI compute centers globally. This will ensure developers have access to Groq technology regardless of their location.
“Aramco Digital is partnering with Groq to build one of the largest AI Inference-as-a-Service compute infrastructure in the MENA region,” said Tareq Amin, Chief Executive Officer, Aramco Digital. “Our close collaboration with Groq is transformational for both domestic and global AI demand.”
Groq LPU AI inference technology is architected with a software-first design to meet the unique characteristics and needs of AI. This approach has given Groq an advantage to bring new models to developers quickly. The investment will enable Groq to accelerate the next two generations of LPU, according to the company.
Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as exclusive placement agent to Groq on the transaction.
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