AI chip startup challenger Nvidia, MatX, raised $500 million | TechCrunch

Brief

MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, raised a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.

The company’s goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLMs and delivering results than Nvidia’s GPUs.

Other investors participating in the round include Patrick Collison and John Collison, co-founders of Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital and Stripe, the startup’s founder and CEO Reiner Pope said in a statement Tuesday. post on LinkedIn.

Although the company has not released its latest valuation, Etched, MatX’s closest competitor, has raised a $500 million seed round at a Valuation at $5 billionBloomberg reported last month. Etched did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

MatX’s latest funding round comes more than a year after its approximately $100 million Series A round, led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch reported earlier that the 2024 cycle valued the startup at more than 300 million dollars.

Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Pope led the development of AI software for Google’s TPUs, the tech giant’s proprietary AI chips. Its co-founder, Mike Gunter, was a lead designer of TPU hardware before leaving to launch the startup.

The new funding will help MatX produce its chips with TSMC, with plans to start shipping them in 2027.

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