London-based chip startup Fractile has raised $220 million in a round led by Accel, with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joining as an angel investor. The company designs inference chips using an in-memory compute architecture that places matrix multiplication inside SRAM cells alongside compute logic, eliminating the DRAM bottleneck that drives up inference costs. Fractile claims its chip can run frontier models 25x faster at one-tenth the cost of current GPU setups, though only simulation and small-silicon results have been disclosed so far. The first commercial chip is expected in 2027. Anthropic is reportedly in early discussions to become a customer, which would make Fractile its fourth compute supplier alongside Nvidia, Google TPUs, and Amazon's chips. The funding will cover tape-out, software stack development, and early customer integration rather than full production ramp.
