Graphcore raises $222 million in Series E Funding Round

Press Releases

Dec 29, 2020

Led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and adding funds managed by Fidelity International and Schroders as new investors together with support from existing investors
Investment will drive further global expansion and accelerate future IPU developments

BRISTOL, England, Dec. 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Graphcore – maker of the Intelligence Processing Unit which is a new type of microprocessor specifically designed to support artificial intelligence workloads – announced today that it has raised $222 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at $2.77 billion post-money. The new investment will be used to support the company’s continued global expansion and to further accelerate future IPU silicon, systems and software development.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’) led the round with participation from funds managed by Fidelity International and Schroders, along with existing Graphcore investors including Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit. This investment brings the total funds raised by Graphcore to more than $710 million, with the company expecting to have over $440 million of cash on hand post-closing to support future growth.

Graphcore CEO and co-founder Nigel Toon said: “Having the backing of such respected institutional investors says something very powerful about how the markets now view Graphcore. The confidence that they have in us comes from the competence we have demonstrated building our products and our business. We have created a technology that dramatically outperforms legacy processors such as GPUs, a powerful set of software tools that are tailored to the needs of AI developers, and a global sales operation that is bringing our products to market.”

The new investors bring to the table deep experience in disruptive technology and support for scale-up businesses and underscore the size of the market opportunity that Graphcore is addressing in datacentre AI compute, as well as the maturity of the company’s product offerings.

“The market for purpose-built AI processors is expected to be significant in the coming years because of computing megatrends like cloud technology and 5G and increased AI adoption, and we believe Graphcore is poised to be a leader in this space,” said Olivia Steedman, Senior Managing Director, Teachers’ Innovation Platform (TIP) at Ontario Teachers’. “TIP focuses on investing in tech-enabled businesses like Graphcore that are at the forefront of innovation in their sector. We are excited to partner with Nigel and the strong management team to support the company’s continued growth and product development.”

The company’s Mk2 IPU products were unveiled in 2020 and are now shipping in production volume to customers.

The IPU-M2000 is a 1U datacentre blade, built around four Graphcore Colossus GC200 IPU processors, capable of one PetaFlop of AI compute. For many AI training and inference tasks, IPU systems significantly outperforms the latest GPU-based systems.

Graphcore’s IPU-POD₆₄for large scale deployments offers the ability to run very large models across up to 64 IPU processors in parallel, or to share the compute resource across multiple users and tasks. For Exascale compute, up to 64,000 IPUs can be connected in IPU-POD configurations.

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP provided legal advice to Graphcore.

About Graphcore

Graphcore is the inventor of the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), the world’s most sophisticated microprocessor, designed for the needs of current and next-generation artificial intelligence workloads.

Since its founding in 2016, Graphcore has raised over $710 million in funding. Investors include:

Ahren Innovation Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, Atomico, Baillie Gifford, BMW iVentures, C4 Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Draper Esprit, Fidelity International, Foundation Capital, Chrysalis Investments (formerly Merian Chrysalis), Mayfair Equity Partners, M&G Investments, Microsoft, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Pitango, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Schroders / Schroder Adveq, Sequoia Capital and Sofina.

More information can be found at https://www.graphcore.ai

About Ontario Teachers’
The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’) is the administrator of Canada’s largest single-profession pension plan, with C$204.7 billion in net assets (all figures at June 30, 2020 unless noted). It holds a diverse global portfolio of assets, approximately 80% of which is managed in-house, and has earned an annual total-fund net return of 9.5% since the plan’s founding in 1990. Ontario Teachers’ is an independent organization headquartered in Toronto. Its Asia-Pacific regional offices are in Hong Kong and Singapore, and its Europe, Middle East & Africa region office is in London. The defined-benefit plan, which is fully funded as of January 1, 2020, invests and administers the pensions of the province of Ontario’s 329,000 active and retired teachers. For more information, visit otpp.com and follow us on Twitter @OtppInfo.