Fractile, a British startup that designs chips for running AI models, said on Nov. 11 that it had raised $720 million. Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint led the round. The UK government says the round values Fractile at more than £5 billion; a news report, citing a person involved in the deal, put the value at $7 billion. In May 2026, Fractile said it had raised $220 million.
Two state investors joined the round: the government's Sovereign AI Venture Fund and the British Business Bank, the UK's economic development bank. The government says backing British companies will reduce the country's reliance on technology from overseas and support skilled jobs. "If AI is going to serve the British people, strengthen our public services and create good jobs across the country, Britain needs to build more of the technology that powers it," said Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister. According to a news report, other investors include BlackRock, DST Global and CapitalG, Google's venture arm.
Fractile designs chips for inference, running a trained model to answer requests, as opposed to training it. The company argues that the time models take to answer is now what holds back the most capable AI. Those answers come out as tokens, the small chunks of text, often parts of words, that AI models read and write. Fractile says the hardest problems can take a model up to 100 million tokens, about 75 million words, and that at the roughly 40 tokens a second these models tend to run at on today's chips, one such answer takes a month.
Fractile wants to cut that month to a day, which it says needs about 1,200 tokens a second. Lightspeed, one of the lead investors, says that when a chip writes an answer it spends most of its time waiting for data to arrive from memory. Lightspeed says Fractile's design stacks memory directly on top of the part of the chip that does the calculations, so far more data can flow to it at once. Lightspeed says the chips can run the most advanced models more than ten times faster, at a fraction of the cost, without saying faster than what.
Fractile is still developing its chips. According to a news report, it plans to launch its first commercial chip in 2027. The company has not named customers or published independent test results for its chips. Neither the Sovereign AI fund nor the British Business Bank has said how much it invested. Sovereign AI says it does not comment on specific figures, and that while its typical investments are worth around £1 million to £10 million, every company's case is different.