AI chip firm Groq secures $750M at $6.9B valuation
Groq, which raised $640 million at a $2.8 billion valuation in August 2024, has more than doubled its valuation in less than a year and has now raised over $3 billion in total.
Artificial intelligence chip company Groq has secured $750 million in fresh funding at a post-money valuation of $6.9 billion.
The funding round was led by growth investment firm Disruptive, with significant contributions from Blackrock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and a major US West Coast mutual fund manager.
Existing investors, including Samsung, Cisco, D1, Altimeter, 1789 Capital and Infinitum, also participated.
Founded in 2016, Groq has established itself as a significant player in the US AI landscape, with its technology used by more than two million developers and a wide array of Fortune 500 companies. Its hardware supports applications across multiple sectors, including cloud services, autonomous technologies, and enterprise AI solutions.
Groq has gained recognition for challenging NVIDIA’s stronghold in AI hardware. The company’s chips, known as LPUs, are built specifically for AI inference rather than graphics tasks, and the hardware functions as an inference engine optimised for efficient model execution. Compared with conventional GPUs, LPUs can offer faster processing speeds and lower energy usage for certain workloads, especially large-scale AI model inference.
The startup’s offerings are aimed at both developers and enterprise customers and are available as cloud services or on-premises hardware. The on-premises solution consists of server racks with integrated hardware and software nodes. Both options can run a variety of open AI models, including those from Meta, Mistral, Google, and OpenAI. The company states that its systems can deliver equal or better performance at a lower cost in many cases.
“As AI expands, the infrastructure behind it will be as essential as the models themselves,” said Alex Davis, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Disruptive. “Groq is building that foundation.”
Disruptive, which has invested nearly $350 million in Groq, has a track record of backing leading companies such as Palantir, Airbnb, Spotify, Shield AI, Hims, Databricks, Stripe, Slack and other AI-focused or adjacent businesses.
Groq, which raised $640 million at a $2.8 billion valuation in August 2024, has more than doubled its valuation in less than a year and has now raised over $3 billion in total.
Edited by Jyoti Narayan