MatX, an innovative chip startup established by two former Google hardware engineers, has successfully secured $500 million in a Series B funding round. This significant investment was jointly spearheaded by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund notably founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.
The company’s ambitious objective is to develop processors capable of outperforming Nvidia’s GPUs by a factor of ten in both the training of large language models (LLMs) and the delivery of computational results.
Reiner Pope, MatX's founder and CEO, announced the funding on LinkedIn on Tuesday, revealing a robust list of additional investors. These include industry players like Marvell Technology and NFDG, venture capital firm Spark Capital, and prominent individual investors such as Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison.
While MatX did not disclose its latest valuation, the fundraising landscape provides some context. Its closest competitor, Etched, reportedly raised a similar $500 million round last month at an impressive $5 billion valuation, as reported by Bloomberg. Etched did not provide immediate comment on its valuation.
This latest capital injection for MatX arrives more than a year after its Series A round, which amounted to approximately $100 million and was led by Spark Capital. Earlier reports by TechCrunch indicated that the startup's valuation in this 2024 funding round exceeded $300 million.
Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Pope held a pivotal role at Google, leading AI software development for the tech giant’s proprietary AI chips, the TPUs. His co-founder, Mike Gunter, also brought significant expertise from Google, having served as a lead designer for TPU hardware before their departure to launch MatX.
The newly acquired funding is earmarked to facilitate the production of MatX’s advanced chips with TSMC, with the company targeting a shipping commencement date in 2027.
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