Robert Bosch Venture Capital participates in Graphcore’s USD 200 million Series D

Graphcore has built a completely new kind of processor and software for AI and machine intelligence. It has been shipping first products to early access customers and generated first revenues this year, just two years after the company was founded. High volume production is now ramping up to meet customer demand for its Intelligent Processing Unit (IPU) PCIe processor cards. Graphcore’s IPU is the first processor to be designed specifically for machine intelligence training and inference and delivers an increase in speed of 10x to 100x compared to today’s hardware. “Graphcore is changing the paradigm of AI computing in the cloud and at the edge. The highly efficient and massively parallel IPU technology can significantly improve AI driven products in many categories such as autonomous driving and security”, says Dr. Hongquan Jiang, Investment Partner at RBVC and board member of Graphcore. “We are very excited to accompany Graphcore’s journey in becoming a global leading AI company”.

Rapid growth towards a global leading AI company

The company is currently in a stage of rapid growth and has tripled the size of its team in 2018. This rate of growth will now accelerate significantly driven by the new investment. The funding is a further step towards fulfilling the company’s ambition to build a global technology company, focused on this new and fast-growing machine intelligence market. RBVC led Graphcore’s Series A in 2016 and has continuously supported the company that has now raised over USD 300 million in funding. RBVC Managing Director Dr. Ingo Ramesohl says: “Graphcore is a perfect fit for the RBVC portfolio in artificial intelligence technologies. We see enormous business potential with Bosch.”

A new age of computing

Nigel Toon, CEO and co-founder of Graphcore, says: “Machine intelligence marks the start of a new age of computing which needs a radically different type of processor and software tools. This new, fast growing market creates the opportunity for Graphcore to build a major global technology company that can help innovators in AI achieve important breakthroughs.”