Chips & Hardware
MatX raises $500 million to challenge Nvidia in AI chips
MatX raised $500 million in Series B funding to develop specialized AI processors that aim to outperform Nvidia’s GPUs by 10 times in LLM training.
MatX, an artificial-intelligence chip startup founded in 2023, has raised a $500 million Series B round—the second major round of venture capital financing. The funding round was led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. Reiner Pope, the co-founder and CEO of MatX, announced the funding on Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn.
The full list of investors in this Series B round includes:
- Jane Street
- Situational Awareness
- Marvell Technology
- NFDG
- Spark Capital (the lead investor of the company’s Series A round)
- Patrick Collison (Stripe co-founder)
- John Collison (Stripe co-founder)
The startup was founded by Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, both of whom are former Google hardware engineers. Before co-founding MatX, Pope led AI software development for Google’s TPUs (Tensor Processing Units; Google’s proprietary AI chips), while Gunter served as a lead designer of the TPU hardware before leaving to launch the startup. The new funding will help MatX produce its chips with manufacturing partner TSMC, with plans to start shipping them in 2027. The company aims to make its processors 10 times better at training Large Language Models (LLMs) and delivering results than Nvidia’s Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
This latest funding comes more than a year after MatX’s Series A round of about $100 million, which was led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch previously reported that the 2024 round valued the startup at more than $300 million. The capital injection arrives as other hardware startups secure funding to challenge Nvidia’s position as the market incumbent. Although MatX did not release its latest valuation for this Series B round, its competitor, Etched, recently raised a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation, according to a Bloomberg report last month.
Why it matters
MatX is positioning itself as a direct competitor to Nvidia by securing significant funding to develop specialized AI processors intended to outperform current GPU standards for LLM training.