Groq Completes $640 Million Financing, Gets Strong Allies and Plans for AI Chip Development
TapTechNews August 6th news, the AI chip startup Groq released an announcement on Monday announcing that it has newly completed a $640 million (TapTechNews note: currently about 4.567 billion yuan) financing, aiming to create a brand-new chip that can handle tasks such as AI inference more quickly.
After Groq completes this round of financing, it has cumulatively completed more than $1 billion in financing in total, and the company's valuation reaches $2.8 billion (currently about 19.983 billion yuan). Reports say that the company initially planned to raise $300 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, but the company's AI chip was recognized by investors, so they increased the investment intensity.
In April 2021, Groq successfully raised $300 million, led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital Partners. At that time, the company's valuation was around $1 billion, and now the company's valuation has risen again, nearly three times that of 2021.
Groq also announced today that Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun will serve as Groq's technical advisor, and Stuart Pann, the former head of Intel's foundry business and former chief information officer of HP, will join this startup company as the chief operating officer.
In view of Meta's investment in its own AI chip, LeCun's appointment is a bit unexpected, but this undoubtedly provides a strong ally for Groq in this highly competitive field.
Groq plans to create a language processing unit (LPU) inference engine that can run existing generative AI models. Its architecture is similar to that of OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4o, with a speed that is 10 times that of regular processors and an energy consumption that is one-tenth of that.
Groq launched a developer platform driven by LPU, named GroqCloud, which provides many open-source models, including Meta's Llama3.1 series, Google's Gemma, OpenAI's Whisper, and Mistral's Mixtral, etc., and supports customers to use the API of its chips in cloud instances.
As of July, GroqCloud's developers have exceeded 356,000; Groq said that part of the proceeds from this round of financing will be used to expand production capacity and add new models and functions.