Sequoia invests $50m in Graphcore

The fresh capital will be used to expand production capacity with the goal of shipping its first chips at the start of 2018. It will hire extra staff in both Bristol and Palo Alto in order to achieve this goal.

Graphcore aims to deliver between 10x to 100x greater capacity than currently available hardware by creating a chip specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies.

Sequoia's Matt Miller will join Graphcore's board of directors and Bill Coughran, also of Sequoia, will join the technical advisory board.

Previous funding
The company has announced $110m of funding in slightly more than a year, according to unquote" data.

Corporate venture capital firms Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Samsung Catalyst Fund led a $30m series-A for Graphcore in October 2016. Amadeus Capital Partners, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital and Pitango Venture Capital also took part.

All of the series-A investors backed another $30m funding round led by Atomico less than a year later in July 2017.

Company
Founded in 2016, Graphcore is a hardware systems company that develops technologies for machine learning and AI applications. Its IPU (intelligence processing unit) chips are the first to be designed specifically for machine learning and AI technologies.

The company currently employs 70 people.

People
Sequoia Capital – Matt Miller, Bill Coughran (partners).
Graphcore – Nigel Toon (CEO).

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