Fractile raising yet more money at an even higher valuation
+Investors, if not also AI labs, remain hungry for alternative suppliers of and approaches to AI acceleration. British startup Fractile is raising $600 million at a $6.5 billion valuation, months after landing $220 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. The company reportedly has inked a deal with Anthropic but has yet to publicly disclose a product.
As of two years ago, the company was focused on in-memory computation (https://xpu.pub/2024/08/16/fractile-computes-in-memory-for-ai-inference/). The key idea is to avoid the bottleneck of loading weights from memory, which should raise compute-unit utilization, increase overall throughput, and decrease power. It’s possible that the company is employing analog multiplier techniques, which may reduce power and die area compared with conventional digital circuits.
Fractile faces the same challenges as every other AI startup, which include software tooling and the red-queen problem. The latter refers to the fast-moving competitive landscape. Topping the Nvidia H100 is a lot less impressive in 2027 than it would’ve been in 2022.
