Groq closes round during Covid-19; exceeding expectations

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Aug 12, 2020, 14:05 ET

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 12, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Groq, the inventor of the unique Tensor Streaming Processor (TSP) chip, announces that it recently closed its current funding round. The investment will enable Groq to pursue new ambitious projects in multiple sectors, doubling headcount in 2020, and again in 2021.

All of Groq's existing strategic investors chose to participate in this latest funding round. New investors also came on board, including angel investors who typically invest in nascent companies, as well as investment firms that usually invest in later stage companies. The round was led by new investor D1 Capital Partners and included new strategic investors such as TDK Ventures.

Adam D'Angelo, OpenAI Board Member, former Facebook Chief Technology Officer, and Quora Founder and CEO shared that, "The primary obstacle to rolling out new, modern machine learning models is the intractable expense of computation. Existing architectures are limited and have slowed the ability for us to take models to production that we've already trained. I've looked at many solutions, and I backed Groq based on the strength of their team and their potential to unlock the use of extremely large models for inference going forward."

"We are excited to invest in an exceptional management team that is leading the development of ground-breaking technology," says Dan Sundheim, founder and chief investment officer of D1 Capital Partners. "We believe that Groq's scalable technology will allow for highly efficient and powerful processing capabilities that can revolutionize the industry."

Longtime technology investor Elad Gil has backed Stripe, GitLab and AirBnB and was one of Groq's earliest backers. "Getting a chip right on the first try is a rare achievement in the semiconductor world," he says, adding, "Groq has assembled the dream team to disrupt the status quo."

Jonathan Ross, CEO of Groq, credited the Groq team for its hard work and commitment. He said the funding allows Groq to scale the business aggressively.

Groq looks forward to revealing more at the AI Hardware Summit on September 29th.

About Groq:
Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Groq delivers industry leading performance, accuracy and sub-millisecond latency with efficient, software-driven solutions for compute-intensive applications. Groq redefines compute by focusing on key technology innovations: software-defined compute, silicon innovation and developer velocity. For more information, visit: https://groq.com/

SOURCE Groq