Is AI chipmaker Graphcore out to eat Nvidia’s lunch? Co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon laughs at that interview opener — perhaps because he sold his previous company to the chipmaker back in 2011.
“I’m sure Nvidia will be successful as well,” he ventures. “They’re already being very successful in this market… And being a viable competitor and standing alongside them, I think that would be a worthy aim for ourselves.”
Toon also flags what he couches an “interesting absence” in the competitive landscape vis-a-vis other major players “that you’d expect to be there” — e.g. Intel. (Though clearly Intel is spending to plug the gap.)
A recent report by analyst Gartner suggests AI technologies will be in almost every software product by 2020. The race for more powerful hardware engines to underpin the machine-learning software tsunami is, very clearly, on.
“We started on this journey rather earlier than many other companies,” says Toon. “We’re probably two years ahead, so we’ve definitely got an opportunity to be one of the first people out with a solution that is really designed for this application. And because we’re ahead we’ve been able to get the excitement and interest from some of these key innovators who are giving us the right feedback.”
Bristol, UK based Graphcore has just closed a $30 million Series B round, led by Atomico, fast-following a $32M Series A in October 2016. It’s building dedicated processing hardware plus a software framework for machine learning developers to accelerate building their own AI applications — with the stated aim of becoming the leader in the market for “machine intelligence processors”.
In a supporting statement, Atomico Partner Siraj Khaliq, who is joining the Graphcore board, talks up its potential as being to “accelerate the pace of innovation itself”. “Graphcore’s first IPU delivers one to two orders of magnitude more performance over the latest industry offerings, making it possible to develop new models with far less time waiting around for algorithms to finish running,” he adds.
Toon says the company saw a lot of investor interest after uncloaking at the time of its Series A last October — hence it decided to do an “earlier than planned” Series B. “That would allow us to scale the company more quickly, support more customers, and just grow more quickly,” he tells TechCrunch. “And it still gives us the option to raise more money next year to then really accelerate that ramp after we’ve got our product out.”
The new funding brings on board some new high profile angel investors — including DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and Uber chief scientist Zoubin Ghahramani. So you can hazard a pretty educated guess as to which tech giants Graphcore might be working closely with during the development phase of its AI processing system (albeit Toon is quick to emphasize that angels such as Hassabis are investing in a personal capacity).
“We can’t really make any statements about what Google might be doing,” he adds. “We haven’t announced any customers yet but we’re obviously working with a number of leading players here — and we’ve got the support from these individuals which you can infer there’s quite a lot of interest in what we’re doing.”
Other angels joining the Series B include OpenAI‘s Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Pieter Abbeel and Scott Gray. While existing Graphcore investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, C4 Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, Pitango and Samsung Catalyst Fund also participated in the round.
Commenting in a statement, Uber’s Ghahramani argues that current processing hardware is holding back the development of alternative machine learning approaches — that he suggests could contribute to “radical leaps forward in machine intelligence”.
“Deep neural networks have allowed us to make massive progress over the last few years, but there are also many other machine learning approaches,” he says. “A new type of hardware that can support and combine alternative techniques, together with…