Fractile is a British AI hardware company founded in the summer of 2022 by Walter Goodwin, who completed a PhD at the University of Oxford’s Robotics Institute. It describes itself as “a chip-first frontier AI company”: it designs the chips and full systems that large AI models run on, with a focus on inference, the stage at which a trained model answers requests. Its stated aim is output at thousands of tokens per second for large models working over long contexts. The UK government describes it as based across London and Bristol, and its job listings also cover San Francisco and Taipei.

Technology

When it left stealth in July 2024, Fractile said it was building in-memory compute, performing operations where model parameters are stored instead of moving them between memory and processor chips. In November 2026, TechCrunch reported that after a pivot the design centres on DRAM stacked on top of each chip, and that the company is also building a machine learning compiler. Performance targets published so far, such as 2024’s goal of inference up to 100 times faster and 10 times cheaper than existing hardware, are the company’s own and came from simulations. No Fractile chip has shipped; the company says its first chips and systems should ship in 2027.

Funding

  • July 2024: $15 million seed, co-led by Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund and Oxford Science Enterprises.
  • February 2026: pledged £100 million over three years to expand in London and Bristol, including a Bristol systems engineering site.
  • May 2026: $220 million Series B led by Accel, Factorial Funds and Founders Fund.
  • November 2026: Series C of more than £500 million at over £5 billion, according to the UK government, with Sovereign AI, the British Business Bank, CapitalG, Lightspeed and Redpoint among investors. TechCrunch reported it at $720 million.

Bloomberg reported in August 2026 that Fractile had an initial agreement to sell about $250 million of chips to Anthropic; neither company commented.

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