London-based AI chip startup Fractile has closed a Series C round worth about £577 million, or roughly $774 million, according to UK Companies House filings, in one of the largest financings ever for a British semiconductor company. The filings show the shares were allotted between September 9 and October 23 and paid for in cash, confirming a round that had been reported as in the works since the summer.
Fractile designs chips built specifically for AI inference — the stage where a trained model generates answers to prompts — rather than for training models from scratch. Its approach, known as in-memory computing, keeps data close to the transistors doing the calculations instead of constantly shuttling it between separate memory and processor chips. The company says that design can run inference far faster and more cheaply than conventional hardware, though it has yet to ship a production chip.
A bet on a different chip architecture
Fractile's chips are engineered around static random-access memory, or SRAM, a fast form of memory built directly into the processor. By fusing memory and compute, the company aims to remove the bottleneck that slows today's AI hardware when models generate long, complex responses. Fractile has claimed its architecture could cut the time needed for very long AI workloads from about a month to a single day, reaching 1,200 tokens per second compared with 40 for current alternatives — figures that remain company claims until independent hardware is tested.
The startup was founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin, a robotics researcher at the University of Oxford, and Yuhang Song. It plans to deploy its hardware in data centres in 2027, and says the new funding will scale its hardware engineering teams in London and Bristol, where it announced a £100 million UK investment plan earlier this year.
Anthropic order gives the round weight
What sets the round apart from a purely speculative bet is an early customer: Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, has placed an initial $250 million chip order with Fractile, according to Bloomberg. The agreement signals that at least one major AI lab is actively looking for alternatives to Nvidia's dominant hardware as it plans capacity years ahead.
The Series C follows a $220 million Series B in May 2026, led by Accel, Founders Fund and Factorial Funds, which valued the company at roughly $1 billion. Reports in August said the new round was targeting about $600 million at a $6.5 billion valuation — a more than sixfold jump in a matter of months that underlines how scarce credible AI chip capacity has become.
A crowded race against Nvidia
Fractile is far from alone in chasing Nvidia. Well-funded rivals such as Cerebras and Etched are also building inference-focused hardware, and established chipmakers are pouring money into the same market. Nvidia still holds a commanding grip on AI accelerators, and Fractile's valuation today reflects anticipated technology and market scarcity rather than proven deployment or disclosed revenue.
Even so, the size of the round makes Fractile one of Europe's most significant chip bets. If its hardware arrives on schedule in 2027 and performs as promised, it could give AI labs a meaningful second source of inference compute — and give Britain a rare contender in a silicon race long dominated by the United States and Asia.
