AI chip startup Groq announced last Monday that it had recently completed a financing of US$640 million (currently about 4.567 billion yuan) to build a new chip that can process tasks such as AI inference faster.
After the completion of this financing, Groq has completed a total of more than US$1 billion in financing, and the company has reached a valuation of US$2.8 billion (currently about 19.983 billion yuan). According to the report, the company initially planned to raise $300 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, but investors were recognized for the company's AI chips, so they increased their investment.
Groq successfully raised $300 million in April 2021, led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital Partners, and was valued at around $1 billion at the time, and now the company's valuation is rising again, nearly three times what it was in 2021.
Groq also announced today that Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at meta, will serve as Groq's technology advisor, and Stuart Pann, former head of Intel's foundry business and former CIO of Hewlett-Packard, will join the startup as COO.
LeCun's appointment came as a bit of a surprise given meta's investment in its own AI chips, but it certainly provides Groq with a strong ally in this competitive space.
Groq plans to create a language processing unit (LPU) inference engine that can run existing generative AI models with an architecture similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4o, 10 times faster than conventional processors, and one-tenth the energy consumption.
Groq launches an LPU-powered developer platform called GroqCloud, which offers a number of open-source models, including Meta's Llama 3.1 series, Google's Gemma, OpenAI's Whisper, and Mistral's Mixtral, to name a few, as well as APIs that enable customers to use their chips in cloud instances.
As of July, GroqCloud had more than 356,000 developers; Groq said a portion of the proceeds from the round will be used to expand production capacity and add new models and features.