UK Startup Takes On GPUs with Neural Network Accelerator

AI startup Graphcore has emerged from stealth mode with the announcement of $30 million in initial Series A funding. The Bristol, UK-based company will use the cash infusion to complete development of its Intelligent Processing Unit (IPU), a custom-built chip aimed at machine learning workloads. The funding was led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH and Samsung Catalyst Fund; also joining were Amadeus Capital Partners, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit plc, Foundation Capital and Pitango Venture Capital. The IPU has been under development at Graphcore for two years, with the first product slated to be released in the second half of 2017. It's designed to work across a range of machine learning application and is applicable to both training and inferencing neural networks.