Machine learning startup Graphcore raises $50M in round led by Sequoia Capital - SiliconANGLE

Machine learning startup Graphcore Ltd. has raised $50 million in new funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital, according to news published Sunday but not yet confirmed by the company itself. It's also not clear what the valuation was on the deal. A report from Bloomberg Nov. 3 said that the company had been chasing a valuation of $1 billion but "wasn't able to reach that height." Founded in 2016, United Kingdom-based Graphcore is building "intelligence processing units," chips that are specifically designed to assist programmers in creating machine learning computer systems that can be used in fields such as with autonomous cars or medical detection devices. The company claims its IPU accelerators and Poplar software framework deliver "the fastest and most flexible platform for current and future machine intelligence applications, lowering the cost of AI in the cloud and datacenter, improving performance and efficiency by between 10x to 100x."