Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Groq has raised $640 million in a funding round led by BlackRock Private Equity Partners. Other existing and new investors included Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, and strategic investors, including Cisco Investments, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. Online investment platform OurCrowd also claims Groq as a portfolio company, although it does not appear they participated in this round. The valuation of the funding round was not made avaiable.
Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq, said the company’s mission is to make AI tools available to anyone—not just big tech. The capital infusion will enable them to deploy over 100,000 additional LPS [language processing units] into the 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.”
Groq reports that it has grown to over 360,000 developers building on GroqCloud. Groq expects to use the funding to also scale the capacity of its tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and features.
Groq views itself as an NVIDIA competitor. A recent blog post threw some shade at the top AI chip firm:
“NVIDIA’s Blackwell isn’t just faster horses; it’s more of them, tied to more buggies, yoked together by an expanding network of harnesses. The scale is stupendous, the engineering remarkable, and, it’s still a horse and buggy architecture.”
Groq claims its approach is 10X more energy efficient while moving towards the “next generation of real-time AI solutions.
As for OurCrowd, typically the platform invests and then lists the offering for smaller investors to participate alongside big money. As the offering page is no longer visible it is not immediately clear as to how much OurCrowd funded and at what stage of funding the platform participated.
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