Graphcore Raises $222M of Investment to Support its Expansion
By: Ashwathy Nair
An investment of $222M has been raised by Graphcore in order to help support the global expansion of the company and to accelerate future IPU silicon, systems and software development.
The Series E funding round is led by Ontario Teacher’s Pensions Plan Board and it adds funds that are managed by Fidelity International and Schroders as new investors. Also participating in this round are existing to have Graphcore investors, which include Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit.
With the firm expecting to have over $440 million cash on hand post-closing to support future growth, this investment, it brings the total funds that are raised by Graphcore to more than $710 million. Now, Graphcore is valued at $2.77 billion, post-money.
It was stated by the company that the new investors bring experience in disruptive technology and it supports for scaling-up businesses and underscores the size of the market opportunity that is being addressed by Graphcore in data centre AI compute and the maturity of the product offerings of the company.
The company said that “the faith that we gained, comes from the capability that we proved by building our products and our establishment. We have been successful enough in developing a technology that leaves behind the legacy processors like GPUs dramatically, which is a powerful set of software tools made-to-order the needs of AI developers, and global sales operations that places our products on the market.”
The year 2020 for Graphcore was contained within the launch of Mk2 IPU processor, data centre compute system and the GC200, the IPU-M2000 and IPU-POD64 for scale-out.
“The point of reference that was first released for the new systems displays them clearly awe-inspiring the current GPU-based configurations. The Partner Program for Graphcore was also introduced. There are some of the world’s most respected distributors, resellers and OEMs that are included in this amazing global network. And most recently, together with complete PyTorch support, Poplar v1.4 was released, ensuring that the most frequently used frameworks are now easy to implement on the IPU and deliver incredibly impressive performance results.”
