Andreessen-backed Gimlet Labs hits $3B valuation with $300M round as AI goes multi-chip

Gimlet Labs has pulled in $300 million at a $3 billion valuation, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the round. Arm and Microsoft’s M12 came in as new backers. That’s a big cheque for a company selling something less flashy than a new chip: the software that lets AI workloads hop between different kinds of silicon.

The startup’s pitch is simple enough. AI doesn’t have to live on one chip from beginning to end, so Gimlet splits the work and sends each part to whatever hardware fits best, whether that means GPUs, CPUs or specialised accelerators. It calls the setup a multi-silicon inference cloud. Gimlet says that approach can deliver three-to-ten-times inference speed improvements for the same cost and power envelope.

But the hard part turned out to be the building itself. Data centres were mostly designed for more uniform hardware, which means different chips can bring different cooling systems, temperatures and configurations. So Gimlet has moved beyond software alone. Asgar says the company is now helping customers configure data centres and is also working on data centres of its own.

That shift helps explain why the company is focusing so hard on inference, the stage where trained models generate responses. It also puts Gimlet alongside specialised players such as Groq and Cerebras, even if it is taking a different route. Groq’s recent fundraising and Cerebras’ move from private challenger to public company show how hot this corner of the market has become, but Gimlet is not trying to win by building the one chip to rule them all.

Instead, it is betting on the glue. The founding team previously worked together at Pixie, the open-source Kubernetes observability company, and Asgar previously founded Pixie Labs, later acquired by New Relic in 2020. Gimlet first raised a $12 million seed round, then an $80 million Series A before this latest jump. The money now says investors think the real leverage may sit in the layer that makes mixed hardware behave like one system.