Graphcore raises $222m in Series E funding round

Graphcore, the Bristol based unicorn, has raised $222m of investment to help support the company’s continued global expansion and further accelerate future IPU silicon, systems and software development. 

The Series E funding round is led by Ontario Teachers’ Pensions Plan Board and adds funds managed by Fidelity International and Schroders as new investors. Also participating in this round are existing Graphcore investors, including Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit.

This investment brings the total funds raised by Graphcore to more than $710 million, with the company expecting to have over $440 million of cash on hand post-closing to support future growth. Graphcore is now valued at $2.77 billion, post-money.

The group of new investors bring to the table deep experience in disruptive technology and support for scale-up businesses and underscore the size of the market opportunity that Graphcore is addressing in datacentre AI compute, as well as the maturity of the company’s product offerings. 

2020 has been another big year for Graphcore, with the launch of our Mk2 IPU processor, the GC200 and our datacentre compute systems, the IPU-M2000 and IPU-POD₆₄ for scale–out. Their first published benchmarks for the new systems show them clearly dominating the latest GPU-based setups. 2020 also saw them launch the Graphcore Partner Program. This impressive global network includes some of the world’s most respected distributors, resellers and OEMs. 

Most recently, they launched Poplar v1.4, including full PyTorch support, ensuring that the most widely used frameworks are now simple to implement on the IPU and yield extremely impressive performance results. 

With their products, software and global sales operation in place, Graphire expect 2021 to be another big year for the company, with customers already taking delivery into their datacentres of IPU-M2000 and IPU-POD₆₄ systems. With advances in artificial intelligence moving apace, we look forward to more innovation powered by Graphcore technology.