Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC) (
www.bosch.com)‚ the corporate venture-capital company of the Bosch Group — has participated in the recently announced financing round of Graphcore, an AI (artificial intelligence) chip maker that has finalised a new $200 million funding round which values the company at $1.7 billion.
Graphcore (
www.graphcore.ai), which has built a completely new kind of processor and software for AI and machine intelligence, has been shipping first products to ‘early access’ customers and generated its first revenues in 2018 — just two years after the company was founded.
High-volume production is now ramping up to meet customer demand for its Intelligent Processing Unit (IPU) PCIe processor cards.
Graphcore says its IPU is the first processor to be designed specifically for ‘machine intelligence training and inference’ and is10 to 100-times faster than existing hardware.
Hongquan Jiang, investment partner at RBVC and board member of Graphcore, said: “Graphcore is changing the paradigm of AI computing in the cloud and at the edge.
“The highly efficient and massively parallel IPU technology can significantly improve AI-driven products in many categories, such as autonomous driving and security.
“We are very excited to accompany Graphcore’s journey in becoming a global leading AI company.”
Nigel Toon, CEO and co-founder of Graphcore, said: “Machine intelligence marks the start of a new age of computing — one that needs a radically different type of processor and software tools.
“This new fast-growing market creates the opportunity for Graphcore to build a major global technology company that can help innovators in AI achieve important breakthroughs.”