Fractile, a London-based company designing chips for running AI models, has raised $220m in a Series B round co-led by Accel, Factorial Funds and Founders Fund. The company announced the round in May 2026.
Conviction, Gigascale, 01A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures and 8VC also took part, alongside existing backers that the company did not name. Fractile did not disclose a valuation.
The company said the money would speed up the path to getting its first chips and systems into customers' hands. It is hiring in London and Bristol in the UK, San Francisco in the US and Taipei in Taiwan.
“Fractile was founded in 2022 on the bet that, eventually, the world’s most capable AI systems would be limited in their impact by the amount of time they take to produce useful outputs.”Walter Goodwin, CEO and Founder, Fractile
What Fractile does
Fractile was founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin, who was then a PhD student at the University of Oxford's Robotics Institute, according to BeBeez. It builds hardware for inference, the stage at which a trained AI model produces answers. Its chips use in-memory compute, an approach in which calculations run directly in memory rather than moving data back and forth to a separate processor.
In its announcement, Fractile argued that the time AI systems take to produce output has become the main limit on what they can do. It said today's large language models can generate up to 100 million tokens on hard problems, and that at the roughly 40 tokens per second they tend to run at on existing chips, an output of that length takes a month. The company said it aims to reach about 1,200 tokens per second, which would cut that month to a day, and blamed memory bandwidth that has not kept pace on current chip designs.
The company said it works across the full stack, from AI research to foundry process work and chip micro-architecture.
Who invested
Latham & Watkins, which advised the three lead investors, described the deal as a Series B. BeBeez reported that earlier backers include Stan Boland, a former Arm and Acorn Computers executive, and former Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger, who invested in January 2025.
Fractile's $15m seed round, announced in July 2024, was led by Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund and Oxford Science Enterprises, with Inovia Capital and Cocoa taking part, according to law firm Goodwin, which advised the company.
Building in the UK
In February 2026 Fractile said it would invest £100m (about $135m) over three years in its UK operations, including growing its London and Bristol sites and opening a hardware engineering facility in Bristol, BeBeez reported.
BeBeez also cited a report by The Information that Anthropic had discussed buying Fractile's chips when they become available in 2027. Fractile has not given a delivery date for its first chips.
The case for faster inference
In its announcement Fractile described inference as both the revenue engine of the AI industry and the factor limiting its expansion.
The company said it sees the largest opportunity not in speeding up today's workloads but in making longer and more complex AI tasks economically viable, in areas such as software engineering, drug discovery and materials research.
Company website: fractile.ai