LONDON — Fractile secured $220 million in a funding round on Tuesday, led by venture firms Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund. Founded in 2022 by University of Oxford researcher Walter Goodwin, the London-based startup builds specialized chips designed to accelerate artificial intelligence inference.
The company, co-founded with Yuhang Song, focuses on the inference stage where trained models generate responses and perform reasoning tasks. Fractile stated that current hardware struggles with complex workloads because of inefficient memory bandwidth, noting that advanced models can produce outputs with tens of millions of tokens.
To overcome memory bottlenecks, Fractile is developing hardware architectures intended to boost performance from roughly 40 tokens per second to 1,200 tokens per second. The company said its systems aim to condense workloads that currently require a month of processing time into just a single day.
Entering a competitive market dominated by NVIDIA alongside rivals such as AMD and Cerebras, Fractile targets applications including drug discovery, software engineering, and materials science. The company is actively hiring across offices in London, Bristol, San Francisco, and Taipei to prepare for commercial deployment.
The $220 million capital injection will support global expansion and the launch of the startup's new hardware systems over the coming years. Fractile did not disclose a specific timeline for the final product release date.
