- Fractile has closed a $720 million Series C round led by Thrive, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint.
- Fractile is now worth $7 billion, up from around $1 billion in May, even though it hasn’t launched a production chip.
- Fractile’s approach is to stack the DRAM on top of the logic, and its first commercial chip is due in 2027.
Back in May, Fractile, a London chip startup, was valued at around $1 billion, with $220 million in the bank and no product actually delivered. The UK company just closed a $720 million Series C, bringing its valuation to $7 billion.
Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed, and Redpoint co-led this round. Founders Fund also co-led Fractile’s $220 million Series B in May with Accel and Factorial Funds.
Fractile has not confirmed the valuation or provided any details on spend beyond the fact that they’re hiring in London, Bristol, Palo Alto, and Taipei.
Stacking memory on logic
Fractile was founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin and Yuhang Song to design chips for AI inference. According to the company, output speed is a key limiting factor for what an advanced AI system can do.
Its solution is to stack the DRAM directly onto the logic. The idea is to achieve higher memory bandwidth than HBM and more capacity than SRAM, the fast memory that’s built into the chip. Memory bandwidth ultimately determines how quickly a chip can access model data and, therefore, its response time.
The technology has not yet been proven in the real world. Fractile hasn’t shipped a production chip and has generated no disclosed revenue. In August, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic had agreed to an initial order of around $250 million in chips, with hardware due in 2027.
Money moved faster than silicon
The round was very much in the news. In October, Companies House filings showed £577 million (about $774 million) in Series C shares issued between 9th September and 23rd October, well above the $720 million announced.
New investors in this round include Dragoneer, DST Global, Elad Gil, BlackRock, BCV, T. Rowe, CapitalG, Georgian, Shopify, Balderton, SV Angel, 20VC, Nebular, SovAI, the British Business Bank and Entropy. Accel, Conviction, Cocoa, Factorial, Felicis, Gigascale and Kindred are all returning.
The round has also received support from the British government. In February, Fractile had around 80 staff and had committed to £100 million over three years for UK expansion, including a hardware facility in Bristol.
A crowded race with few shipped chips
Rivals have also raised substantial amounts of capital. Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street. Olix raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation. Cerebras went public in May at a valuation in excess of $56 billion. Nvidia licensed Groq’s technology in December 2025.
Fractile is at $7 billion, so it sits between Olix and Etched, with the least silicon shipped of the three.
Fractile now has the funds to build the product. They still need to prove that stacked DRAM works at scale and that customers will actually go with their solution in 2027.
