Nigel Toon, Graphcore’s CEO, pictured right with CTO Simon Knowles, said: “Atomico has a genuinely deep understanding of the machine intelligence market and how it will evolve over the coming years. It also shares our vision for building a major new company that can stand at the forefront of what we call ‘Compute 2.0’ – this new age of machine intelligence computing.”
Atomico – which runs one of the largest technology funds in Europe – is the lead investor. Atomico partner Siraj Khaliq, who will join Graphcore’s board, said: “It’s clear that machine intelligence will sit at the heart of the technological leaps we’ll see in this coming chapter of human history – a process already well underway.”
Graphcore’s first IPU is expected to deliver ‘one to two orders of magnitude’ more performance than current technology. Khaliq said this should make it possible to develop new models with far less time waiting around for algorithms to finish running. “In that sense, the IPU doesn’t just accelerate code, it should also help developers accelerate the pace of innovation itself.”
Alongside Atomico and existing investors, the Series B round has seen AI pioneers Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Greg Brockman (OpenAI), Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI), Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley/OpenAI), Scott Gray (OpenAI) and Zoubin Ghahramani (University of Cambridge, Chief Scientist at Uber) join as angel investors.
“Many of the leading innovators that we have been working with over the last three years will be early access customers and we will have an exciting time over the next few months,” Toon noted.
