Graphcore
semiconductor company
Graphcore Limited is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It has introduced a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor.
History
Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Simon Knowles and Nigel Toon.
In the autumn of 2016, Graphcore secured a first funding round led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Other backers included Samsung, Amadeus Capital Partners, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, and Pitango.
In July 2017, Graphcore secured a round B funding led by Atomico, which was followed a few months later by $50 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.
In December 2018, Graphcore closed its series D with $200 million raised at a $1.7 billion valuation, making the company a unicorn. Investors included Microsoft, Samsung and Dell Technologies.
On 13 November 2019, Graphcore announced that its Graphcore C2 IPUs were available for preview on Microsoft Azure.
Meta Platforms acquired the AI networking technology team from Graphcore in early 2023.
The public source identifies “Graphcore” as semiconductor company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Graphcore, semiconductor and company.
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This entry incorporates text from “Graphcore” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.