Fractile in talks for $600M at $6.5B on Anthropic chip deal

Fractile, a British chip startup, is in advanced talks to raise around $600mn at a pre-money valuation of $6.5bn, The Next Web reported, citing Bloomberg. Three months ago the same company was worth roughly $1bn.

The jump follows an initial agreement to supply Anthropic with about $250mn of inference chips. Those chips will not ship until 2027.

Founded in 2022 by Oxford roboticist Walter Goodwin, Fractile makes chips designed to speed up how quickly AI models generate answers, framing its pitch on inference "as AI moves from single answers to long chains of reasoning." The $220mn round it closed three months ago, at roughly $1bn, was led by Accel, Founders Fund and Factorial Funds. The investors on the new round have not been named.

The $600mn headline "includes some money invested at a lower valuation," per the reporting, so the split between old money and new is not spelled out. Bloomberg's sourcing is "people familiar with the matter," and Fractile has not confirmed the terms publicly.

Anthropic's $250mn commitment, an order that doesn't deliver until 2027, is what changed the price. The lab has been building out inference supply across multiple vendors, with a reported approach for Decart and an expanding pre-IPO revolver both surfacing this week. Fractile now sits alongside a small cohort of inference chip startups that investors have re-rated hard: Etched at $21bn, Groq at $3.5bn. It is the only one of the three that isn't American.

The article names no process node, no memory architecture, no benchmark for the chip itself. What it does establish: a 2022 Oxford spinout with pre-production silicon just cleared a $6.5bn mark on the strength of a purchase order that ships in two years.