AI chip company Groq has closed a $640m funding round.
Led by BlackRock, the round also saw participation from Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
Groq also announced two new appointments. Stuart Pann, former HP and Intel senior executive, joins as COO, while Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, has joined as the company’s newest technical advisor. LeCun will keep his position at Meta.
The startup previously closed a $300m round in 2021, led by Tiger Global and D1 Capital which valued the business at $1 billion. This latest round brings Groq’s total raise to more than $1bn and values the company at $2.8bn.
In March 2024, Groq acquired Definitive Intelligence for an undisclosed sum. At the time, the company said the acquisition would support the company’s GroqCloud unit, which will be led by Definitive Intelligence co-founder and CEO Sunny Madra.
Groq was co-founded in 2016 by Jonathan Ross, who previously helped lead Google's Tensor Processing Unit development. The company provides dedicated chips and accelerators within its own servers and racks designed for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing.
The company’s flagship LPU (language processing unit) inference engine can run existing LLMs such as ChatGPT at 10x the speed of other available inference engines, the company claims. In November, Groq’s LPU set an inference speed record while running Meta’s Llama 2 70B LLM during a benchmark test.
In March 2024, it was reported that Groq had deployed around 4,500 chips.
