Groq raises $640M to challenge NVIDIA in AI chip arena
What's the story
Groq, an artificial intelligence chip startup, has successfully secured $640 million in a recent funding round.
The round was spearheaded by Blackrock and saw contributions from Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
This investment pushes Groq's total funding past the $1 billion mark and raises the company's valuation to $2.8 billion.
Valuation surge
Groq's valuation more than doubles with latest funding
Groq initially aimed to raise $300 million at a valuation of $2.5 billion.
However, the recent funding round has more than doubled the company's previous valuation of around $1 billion in April 2021.
This significant increase occurred when Groq raised $300 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital Partners.
New appointments
Groq appoints Meta's chief AI scientist as technical advisor
Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, will serve as a technical advisor to Groq.
Additionally, Stuart Pann, the former head of Intel's foundry business and ex-CIO at HP, has been appointed as Groq's chief operating officer.
The company, which emerged from stealth mode in 2016, is developing a language processing unit (LPU) inference engine that can run generative AI models with increased speed and reduced energy consumption.
Leadership profile
Groq CEO known for inventing Google's TPU
Groq CEO Jonathan Ross is recognized for his contribution to the invention of Google's tensor processing unit (TPU), a custom AI accelerator chip used to train and run models.
Ross co-founded Groq with Douglas Wightman, an entrepreneur and former engineer at Alphabet's X moonshot lab.
The startup offers an LPU-powered developer platform budded 'GroqCloud' that provides open models like Meta's Llama 3.1 family, Google's Gemma, OpenAI's Whisper, and Mistral's Mixtral.
Expansion plans
Groq plans to expand capacity with new funding
Groq intends to use a portion of the new funding to increase capacity and add new models and features.
As of July, GroqCloud had over 356,000 developers. "Many of these developers are at large enterprises," said Stuart Pann, Groq's COO. "By our estimates, over 75% of the Fortune 100 are represented."
Groq is up against stiff competition from NVIDIA, which controls an estimated 70% to 95% of the market for AI chips.