A Bristol based start-up company has raised over $150million, bringing its current valuation to $1.95 billion.
Graphcore Ltd is a Bristol-based semiconductor firm whose chips are used to run artificial programs.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the company now has $300 million in cash which will be used to invest in research, development and global expansion.
At the end of 2018, Graphcore Ltd closed a $200 million Series D investment and they have now extended that funding round with an additional $150 million private placement as primary investment.
Chief executive officer Nigel Toon said: “Having this additional capital on hand allows us to accelerate our investment and allows us to be in a position to support the really large customers who we’re building business with.”
Graphcore's chips themselves are designed for "less precise" computing and they mimic the way the human brain works. This helps artificial intelligence machines draw conclusions like we do.
Graphcore has also expanded their operations beyond Bristol. Last year, it announced a deal with Microsoft Corp to offer its processing units on the U.S. company's Azure cloud platform, with financial services giant Citadel.
This means the company has been able to employ additional engineers and have expanded their operations into Asia and the US, ramping up its customer service force and software development arm.
The firm is also expanding its team in Oslo creating large-scale systems connecting thousands of processors that can take on very complex problems.
One of the most important ones is that raised by natural-language processing, which is important for the digital assistants proliferating on home speakers and smartphones, and self-driving cars.
