MatX, a startup designing chips that assist massive language fashions, has raised a Sequence A of roughly $80 million, three sources say, lower than a yr after elevating its $25 million seed spherical.
Spark Capital led the funding, valuing the corporate at a pre-money valuation within the mid-$200 million vary and a post-money valuation of the low $300 million vary, an individual who reviewed the deal advised TechCrunch.
MatX was co-founded two years in the past by Mike Gunter, who beforehand labored at Google on the design of Tensor Course of Models (TPUs), the tech large’s AI chips, and Reiner Pope, who additionally got here from Google’s TPU group, the place he wrote AI software program.
Gunter and Pope hope to assist ease the scarcity of chips designed to deal with AI workloads. They are saying the candy spot for his or her chips are AI workloads of “at the very least” 7 billion, and “ideally” 20 billion or extra activated parameters. And so they boast that their chips ship excessive efficiency at extra inexpensive costs, in response to MatX’s web site. The startup says its chips are notably good at scaling to massive clusters due to MatX’s superior interconnect, aka the communication pathways that AI chips use to switch info.
The pair advised Bloomberg that the corporate’s aim is to make its processors ten instances higher at coaching LLMs and delivering outcomes than NVIDIA’s GPUs. The Data reported final month that MatX was seeking to elevate between $75 million and $100 million for the spherical.
The startup’s seed spherical was introduced final December led by high-profile AI angel buyers Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub; and Daniel Gross, who beforehand ran search and AI at Apple after Apple purchased his startup, Cue, in 2013. Friedman and Gross incessantly angel make investments collectively. Now, Gross has cofounded a brand new AI firm, Protected Superintelligence, with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sustkever.
Firms designing chips have seen an elevated curiosity from buyers amid the AI increase and stratospheric demand for NVIDIA’s processors. Groq, a chip startup that was based by a former TPU engineer Jonathan Ross, noticed its valuation almost triple to $2.8 billion in August up from its earlier valuation of $1 billion set in April.
MatX and Spark didn’t reply to a request for remark.
