Graphcore

Hardware · Bristol, GB

British AI chipmaker developing intelligence processing units (IPUs), owned by SoftBank since 2024.

Founders

Nigel Toon (United Kingdom · ♂) — A serial semiconductor entrepreneur, Toon teamed up with longtime collaborator Simon Knowles after their prior chip ventures to found Graphcore in 2016 and build dedicated AI processors (IPUs).
Simon Knowles (United Kingdom · ♂) — A veteran chip architect who co-founded Icera and Element14 with Toon, Knowles co-founded Graphcore as CTO to design a massively parallel processor purpose-built for machine learning.

Shares the most investors with (number = shared investors):

Date	Round	Amount
May 2026	Funding round SoftBank injected about $457M into British chipmaker Graphcore, acquired in 2024, to relaunch its global expansion including a £1B AI campus in Bengaluru.	$457M
Dec 2020	Series D Plus British AI chipmaker Graphcore raised about $222M in a Series E round at a $2.77B valuation, led by Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board.	$222M

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Data is community-curated and may be incomplete.