MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B round led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund created by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.
The company aims for its processors to be 10 times better in LLM training and performance than Nvidia’s GPUs.
Other investors in the round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, the startup’s founder and CEO Reiner Pope announced in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.
Although the company did not disclose its latest valuation, Etched, MatX’s closest competitor, raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last month. Etched did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
MatX’s latest round comes more than a year after a roughly $100 million Series A led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch previously reported that the 2024 round valued the startup at more than $300 million.
Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Pope led AI software development for Google’s TPUs, the tech giant’s proprietary AI chips. Its co-founder, Mike Gunter, was TPU’s lead hardware designer before leaving to launch a startup.
The new funding will help MatX manufacture its chips with TSMC, with plans to start shipping them in 2027.
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