AI chip startup Fractile has exited stealth and raised $15 million in seed funding.

The round was co-led by Kindred Capital, NATO Innovation Fund, and Oxford Science Enterprises and included participation from a number of angel investors, including Stan Boland, co-founder of Icera, and Amar Shah, co-founder of Wayve.

The seed raise brings Fractile’s total funding to date to $17.5m.

Founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin, who holds a PhD in AI and robotics from the University of Oxford, the UK-based startup has been developing chips that use an in-memory compute approach to improve inference performance, a process which the company claims current hardware offerings are not well suited for.

Fractile says in addition to allowing for faster AI model inference performance, its chips will also have a reduced power consumption, however, thus far, its designs have only been tested in computer simulations, with a test chip still yet to be manufactured. Despite this, the company believes its hardware will ultimately be able to run large language models 100x faster and 10x cheaper than Nvidia’s GPUs, and have a 20x better performance per watt of energy than any other AI hardware currently on the market.

“In today’s AI race, the limitations of existing hardware – nearly all of which is provided by a single company – represent the biggest barrier to better performance, reduced cost, and wider adoption. Fractile’s approach supercharges inference, delivering astonishing improvements in terms of speed and cost,” said Dr. Walter Goodwin, CEO and founder of Fractile.

He added: “This is more than just a speed-up – changing the performance point for inference allows us to explore completely new ways to use today’s leading AI models to solve the world’s most complex problems. We’re thrilled to have raised our funding from investors with a wealth of experience in the AI and chip industries, continue to grow our world-class team and further our technological development and partnerships.”