Graphcore announced it’s raised $222 million investment for IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) silicon, systems and software development, and global expansion. This investment brings the total funds raised to more than $710 million, and values the firm at $2.8 billion
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.
In 2020, Graphcore launched its Mk2 IPU processor, the GC200 and its datacentre compute systems, the IPU-M2000 and IPU-POD64 for scale-out. The first published benchmarks for the new systems show improvement for training and inference over latest GPU-based setups.