AI Chip Startup Groq Closes $300 Million in Series C Fundraising

AI chip startup Groq has announced that it closed $300 million in new Series C fundraising, co-led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital, along with The Spruce House Partnership and Addition. Groq is a leader in computer accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high performance computing.

With the new fundraising round, Groq’s total funding is up to $367 million, with $300 million being raised since the second-half of 2020. The rise in funding follows a strong customer endorsement of the company’s first launched product. 

Groq's Mission

Groq will now aim to grow across industries, set out to hire new talent, and accelerate its products in development following the fundraising. The AI semiconductor market is expected to reach between $65 billion and $100 billion by 2025, so Groq is positioning itself to continue being a leader as the industry grows rapidly. 

Jonathan Ross is Groq Founder and CEO.

“AI is limited by existing systems, many of which are being followed or incrementally improved upon by new entrants. No matter how much money you throw at the problem, legacy architectures like GPUs and CPUs struggle to keep up with the growing demands of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Ross. “Our mission is more disruptive: Groq seeks to unleash the potential of AI by driving the cost of compute to zero.”

Besides being co-led with investment from Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital, additional investment came from The Spruce House Partnership, Addition, GCM Grosvenor, Xn, Firebolt Ventures, XTX Ventures, Boardman Bay Capital Management, and Infinitum Partners. Follow-on investments came from TDK Ventures, XTX Ventures, Boardman Bay Capital Management, and Infinitum Partners. 

Scott Schleiger is Partner at Tiger Global Management. 

“We are excited to partner with Groq as they continue building a world-class AI chip that is uniquely capable of addressing both inference and training applications,” said Shleifer. “We were impressed by Groq's software first approach, innovative architecture, and focus on customer success.”

Nicolas Sauvage is Managing Director of TDK Ventures. 

“We are more than doubling-down on our investment in Groq,” said Sauvage. “Their elegant AI chipset architecture is impressive and will have a powerful impact for our planet. Scaling traditional compute consumes enormous energy. Groq’s solution delivers order-of-magnitude more efficient compute-per-energy performance at scale, thereby improving the carbon footprint of hyperscale data centers, an ideal about which TDK Ventures is very passionate.”

Groq’s Technology

Groq is responsible for the industry’s fastest single core chip with its tensor streaming processor (TSP) architecture. The Groq chip eliminates many of the barriers of traditional computing, and it is easier to program with 10x lower latency compared to leading competitors. 

TSP houses a single massive processor with hundreds of functional units rather than a small programmable core that is replicated up to hundreds of times. The TSP architecture drastically reduces instruction-encoding overhead and can handle integer and floating-point data, which results in the best accuracy for inference and training. 

Groq is based in Mountain View, CA with remote teams across the United States and Canada.