KDDI, Cisco, Samsung Back AI Chip Startup Groq's $640M Funding Round

Source: Groq

The round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners with participation from both existing and new investors including Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, and strategic investors including Cisco Investments, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. 

The unique, vertically integrated Groq AI inference platform has generated skyrocketing demand from developers seeking exceptional speed. Groq also announced that Stuart Pann, formerly a senior executive from HP and Intel, joined its leadership team as Chief Operating Officer. Groq also gains the world-class expertise of its newest technical advisor, Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

"The market for AI compute is meaningful and Groq's vertically integrated solution is well positioned to meet this opportunity. We look forward to supporting Groq as they scale to meet demand and accelerate their innovation further," said Samir Menon, Managing Director, BlackRock Private Equity Partners.

"You can’t power AI without inference compute. We intend to make the resources available so that anyone can create cutting-edge AI products, not just the largest tech companies. This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud. Training AI models is solved, now it's time to deploy these models so the world can use them. Having secured twice the funding sought, we now plan to significantly expand our talent density. We're the team enabling hundreds of thousands of developers to build on open models and – we’re hiring," said Jonathan Ross, CEO and Founder of Groq.

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