Fractile is a London-based AI chip company building inference hardware that attacks the single biggest inefficiency in running large language models: the constant shuttling of data between processors and memory. Traditional accelerators spend much of their energy and time moving model weights back and forth from memory to compute units. Fractile's answer is in-memory compute — an architecture that runs matrix calculations directly within the memory where the weights live, collapsing the bottleneck and promising order-of-magnitude gains in speed and efficiency for inference workloads.
The company was founded in 2022 by Dr. Walter Goodwin, then a PhD student at the University of Oxford's Robotics Institute. Fractile's design notably leans on SRAM-centric architecture that reduces the need for the pricey, supply-constrained DRAM that dominates conventional AI accelerator bills of materials. In an era of acute memory shortages and soaring HBM prices, a DRAM-lighter approach to inference is strategically attractive to the AI labs and cloud providers footing enormous hardware bills.
Fractile's positioning is squarely on inference, the workload that increasingly dominates AI compute spend as models move from training into mass production. By radically accelerating how quickly tokens can be generated and lowering the cost per token, Fractile aims to make frontier-scale models economically viable to serve at scale. The company has reportedly drawn interest from Anthropic, which has explored buying inference chips from the startup — a strong signal of demand from a leading frontier lab.
The company first raised $15 million in seed funding in July 2024 from investors including Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cocoa and Inovia Capital, with angels including former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser. In 2025-2026 Fractile raised a substantial $220 million round co-led by Accel, Factorial Funds and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, Felicis, Buckley Ventures and 8VC.
With deep technical roots, marquee semiconductor angels and a clear thesis that inference is the next great hardware battleground, Fractile is among the most closely watched AI chip challengers in Europe.