LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Fractile, a startup based across London and Bristol, has announced it is developing advanced chips - the hardware that powers artificial intelligence - with funding from the UK Government's Sovereign AI Venture Fund and the British Business Bank.
The £500 million investment, announced Wednesday, is another step in the government's ambition to make Britain a world leader in the technologies that will shape the future of AI, ensuring that British scientific excellence translates into British companies, highly skilled jobs and industrial strength.
It will also help strengthen Britain's sovereign capabilities in critical technologies, reducing dependence on fragile overseas supply chains, and ensuring the UK has a greater stake in the hardware that will underpin its future economy, the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and British Business Bank said in a press release.
Fractile is re-inventing the hardware that AI runs on, so that it is faster, more energy efficient, and less costly. It is taking a unique approach, looking at the full stack of technologies that AI rests upon: from chips, to software and fundamental research into machine learning. Wednesday's funding round values the company at more than £5 billion. Besides Sovereign AI and the British Business Bank, it is also being backed by investors including CapitalG, Lightspeed and Redpoint.
Through Sovereign AI, the UK government is backing British chip designers, advanced hardware companies, and AI entrepreneurs.
The British Business Bank is the UK's economic development bank, helping innovative businesses access the finance they need to start up, scale up and stay in the UK. Their support will help the company access the long-term capital needed to scale its breakthrough AI hardware technology in the UK.
UK's AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said, 'For too long, Britain has produced some of the world's best scientific ideas, only to see too much of the technology, industry and wealth they create built elsewhere. We are determined to change that. If AI is going to serve the British people, strengthen our public services and create good jobs across the country, Britain needs to build more of the technology that powers it.'
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