Fractile eyes $6.5B valuation after Anthropic chip deal as UK AI challenger takes aim at Nvidia

Fractile is in advanced talks to raise about $600 million at a $6.5 billion pre-money valuation, according to Bloomberg. That would put the British chip startup at more than six times the value it had after its last round closed in May, and the latest re-rate comes off the back of a $250 million chip deal with Anthropic for AI inference hardware.

The speed of the valuation jump says as much about the market as it does about Fractile. In May, the company raised $220 million at roughly a $1 billion valuation, led by Accel, Founders Fund and Factorial Funds. Before that, it had been sounding out a $200 million round at the same billion-dollar mark. Now investors are apparently willing to price the company at $6.5 billion on the strength of a customer commitment that is still more promise than revenue.

That’s because the chips are not due for deployment until 2027. So this is not a story about a new product ripping through the market; it’s a bet that a lab as large as Anthropic is willing to commit early to Fractile’s architecture. The company, founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin while he was a PhD student at Oxford’s Robotics Institute, is built around in-memory compute, which keeps data close to the transistors doing the work instead of sending it off to separate memory chips.

Fractile has said that approach could make large language models up to 100 times faster and 10 times cheaper than current GPU setups, though its newer investor materials soften that to 25 times faster and one-tenth the cost. The startup raised about $17.5 million in seed funding before its Series B, with backing from Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund and Oxford Science Enterprises, plus angel money from former Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger and Arm veteran Stan Boland.

The broader inference-chip race explains why the number doesn’t look quite as wild as it first appears. Cerebras went public after a big valuation jump, Etched just raised $700 million at $21 billion, and Groq closed a round this month at $3.5 billion. Fractile is still years from shipping its first production chip, but the market is already paying up for anyone who might have an answer to Nvidia.