Oxford Science Enterprises-backed Fractile raises £11.7m
A start-up founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin, who holds an Oxford PhD in AI and robotics, has raised $15 million (around £11.7 million) in seed funding.
Fractile is developing analog computing chips to run the world's largest AI models more than 100 times faster than existing GPUs (graphic processing units). The step-change in speed and power efficiency will remove the global hardware bottleneck in AI deployment, says the company, as well as unlocking a new wave of human-machine interactions made possible by near-instant processing.
Walter Goodwin, CEO and Founder, said: "The world’s biggest AI companies are engaged in a race to build, train and deploy the best foundational models, yet they’re held back by the limitations of the hardware they all rely on. As we enter the era of foundation models that are used by billions of people, the monetary and energy cost of running these models is extraordinary.
"Today’s AI chips are the biggest constraint to better performance, and we want to fix that.
"Fractile is taking a contrarian approach to building chips and systems for AI. By using novel circuits to execute 99.99 per cent of the operations needed to run model inference and by shifting to in-memory compute, a Fractile system will be able to run state-of-the-art AI models 100x faster, 10x cheaper, and at a substantial power reduction.
"With the help of our investors - Kindred Capital VC, NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), Oxford Science Enterprises, Inovia Capital, Cocoa 🍫 and angel investors including Stan Boland and Hermann Hauser, we’re focused on expanding our team across silicon, software and AI, building commercial partnerships, and accelerating our blistering progress towards our first product."
