AI chip startup MatX has raised about $500M in a funding round led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.
Other backers of the Series B financing include Spark Capital, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman’s fund, Patrick and John Collison, Triatomic Capital, Harpoon Ventures, Andrej Karpathy, and Dwarkesh Patel. Investors across the supply chain include Alchip and Marvell, according to the company.
The company said they are building a Large Language Model, or LLM, chip called MatX One that delivers higher throughput than any other chip while also achieving the lowest latency. The chip combines the low latency of SRAM-first designs with the long-context support of High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM.
The startup noted that the financing was done to wrap up development and quickly scale manufacturing, with tapeout in under a year.
The startup was founded by Reiner Pope, who worked on software for Google’s chips and AI models, and Mike Gunter, a former hardware engineer for the company’s tensor processing unit, or TPU, chips.
The company’s hardware would potentially compete with Nvidia (NVDA), Bloomberg News reported.
Nvidia and Google rely on HBM to build chips that handle the huge volume of calculations needed to train AI models. Other chip companies have used static random access memory to process individual user queries faster, catering to the growing demand for inference, the report noted.
Inference is a phase where a trained LLM applies learned patterns to new, unseen data to make predictions, generate content, or make decisions.
“Our position is that it is actually possible to do both in the same product and you get a much better product as a result,” said CEO Pope, according to the report.
The company declined to reveal the exact valuation but said it’s now valued at several billion dollars, the report noted.
MatX expects to complete the final design of its chip this year and hopes to start shipping in 2027. The company plans to work with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) to make the product. The new funding is intended to help it reserve manufacturing capacity and parts to ensure it can ship rapidly once ready, said Gunter.