Top AI experts have backed British chip startup Graphcore with $30m

Some of the world's leading experts in artificial intelligence are among fresh investors to plough $30m into a Bristol-based chip startup.

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and Zoubin Ghahramani, Uber's chief scientist and Cambridge university professor, are among new investors in Graphcore, which makes chips that can process machine learning faster and more efficiently.

It comes hot on the heels of a $30m (£23m) raise only in October last year. While the latest cash was not a necessity, the calibre of interested investors after the oversubscribed series A led Graphcore to take on the new round of investment, which was led by VC firm Atomico.

AI experts Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Pieter Abbeel, Scott Gray from research group OpenAI are aso investing in the latest round.

Graphcore will spend the fresh funds on developing its technology and the business at a faster rate than originally anticipated.

Hassabis, said: “Building systems capable of general artificial intelligence means developing algorithms that can learn from raw data and generalise this learning across a wide range of tasks. This requires a lot of processing power, and the innovative architecture underpinning Graphcore's processors holds a huge amount of promise."

Atomico partner Siraj Khaliq will join the Graphcore board. He said: "It’s clear that machine intelligence will sit at the heart of the technological leaps we’ll see in this coming chapter of human history – a process already well underway."

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