Fractile Secures $720 Million in Funding: Stacking Memory on Chips to Accelerate AI Inference by 10x

Beating AI News: UK-based AI chip startup Fractile has secured $720 million in Series C funding, pushing its post-money valuation to $7 billion. In May this year, the firm had just raised $220 million at a valuation of roughly $1.1 billion. In less than six months, its valuation has surged 6.4-fold. What makes the company particularly notable is that it has not yet launched a mass-produced chip, yet it has drawn investments from prominent firms including Founders Fund, Google’s CapitalG, and Lightspeed, with even the UK government’s sovereign AI fund participating. Fractile aims to address the memory bottleneck in AI inference. Every token generated by large models requires repeated reads of model parameters and context. Even if a chip has strong computing power, if memory transfer speed lags, the compute units will be forced to wait for data. Fractile’s solution is to stack custom DRAM memory directly on top of compute chips, rather than placing high-bandwidth memory (HBM) alongside chips as mainstream GPUs do. The firm aims to significantly boost data transfer speeds while retaining large memory capacity. Founder Walter Goodwin claims the design could accelerate AI inference response speeds by 10x. Partnership rumors between Fractile and Anthropic have also circulated. In August this year, Bloomberg cited sources familiar with the matter as saying the two sides had reached a preliminary chip purchase agreement worth around $250 million. However, the Financial Times’ latest report is more cautious, stating only that Anthropic intends to be an early customer. Fractile plans to deliver its first batch of chips and systems in 2027.