Groq, a developer of hardware made specifically for artificial intelligence inference, has raised $750M in its latest funding round to reach a valuation of $6.9B.
The funding round was led by Disruptive and featured investments from Blackrock (NYSE:BLK), Neuberger Berman (NYSE:NML), Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners (OTCQX:DTEGY), Samsung (OTCPK:SSNLF), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and others.
Groq builds custom hardware known as Language Processing Units, or LPUs, and a full-stack platform called GroqCloud. These are designed to accelerate AI inference and create new use cases for large language models and other AI applications.
“Inference is defining this era of AI, and we’re building the American infrastructure that delivers it with high speed and low cost,” said Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross.
Groq was founded nearly 10 years ago in Mountain View, Calif., by a group of former Google (GOOG)(GOOGL) engineers who helped develop the tensor processing unit, or TPU. Its chips are manufactured at a Samsung foundry located in Taylor, Texas, on a 4-nanometer process.
Disruptive, a Dallas-based investment firm, has backed several successful tech startups over the past decade, including Palantir (PLTR), Databricks, Airbnb (ABNB), Spotify (SPOT) and Slack.