“We have a chance to build Britain’s first one trillion dollar company,” says executive at top UK chip startup

A UK chip startup has a very big dream attached to it: Fractile’s business operations chief says it could become Britain’s first $1 trillion company. Carmen Alfonso Rico, who joined the company in June, made the claim on the Tech.eu podcast while arguing that Fractile has a shot at winning the AI hardware race.

That is a long way from where the company actually is today. Fractile has not launched a commercial product yet, and even Rico said it still has a lot of ground to cover before it becomes a double-digit billion dollar company, never mind anything with twelve zeros attached.

The startup was founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin. Its pitch is simple enough to explain and hard enough to build: keep data directly on the chip instead of constantly moving it back and forth between the processor and separate memory. Fractile says that approach could run large language models up to 100 times faster than existing hardware and cut operating costs by 90 per cent.

Investors have clearly been willing to back the ambition. Fractile is supported by Accel and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Cocoa Ventures, the fund Rico started in 2021, invested in a 2024 round. Bloomberg has reported that Fractile is raising $600m at a $5.6bn valuation, and that it has also signed a deal to sell chips to Anthropic. The company says its specialised chips should be ready for data centre deployment in 2027.

Rico’s move is unusual, but not random. She said taking the full-time role at Fractile should help Cocoa Ventures and its portfolio by giving her more access and a better network. A Cocoa Ventures executive will handle day-to-day operations while she splits her attention, and Rico says her portfolio companies had no issue with the arrangement.