Graphcore is now a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp and will continue to operate under the Graphcore name.
“This is a tremendous endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, as well as a great outcome for our company,” said Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon. “Demand for AI compute is vast and continues to grow. There remains much to do to improve efficiency, resilience, and computational power to unlock the full potential of AI. In SoftBank, we have a partner that can enable the Graphcore team to redefine the landscape for AI technology.”
2012
January
The idea for Graphcore is born when Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles meet at the Marlborough Tavern, Bath, to discuss their next venture, after selling their previous semiconductor company.
2013
Q4
The Graphcore project begins in stealth mode. A team is formed to build the first processor designed from the ground up for machine intelligence, based in Bristol, UK.
2016
June
Graphcore is officially founded as a company, with its headquarters in Wine Street, Bristol, UK.
2016
October
Graphcore raises $32m in Series A funding round, led by Bosch. Other strategic investors include Dell Technologies Capital and Samsung, as well as leading venture investors Amadeus Capital, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital and Pitango.
2017
July
Graphcore raises $30m in Series B funding round led by new investor, Atomico. AI luminaries including Demis Hassabis, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Pieter Abbeel, Scott Gray and Zoubin Ghahramani invest in the company.
2017
November
One of the world's most prestigious VC firms, Sequoia Capital, invests $50m in a Series C funding round to support Graphcore in significant growth acceleration.
2018
July
Graphcore begins to ship IPU products to early access customers and shows its C2 IPU Accelerator PCIe card for the first time in public at the ICML 2018 Conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
2018
December
Graphcore raises $200m in Series D funding round and becomes a unicorn, valued at $1.7bn. New investors include BMW, Microsoft, Chrysalis (formerly Merian) and Sofina.
2019
November
IPU products are officially launched and first customers, including Microsoft, are announced. IPUs are available on Microsoft Azure and to buy from Dell.
2020
February
Graphcore raises $150m in Series D2 funding round and is now valued at $1.95bn. New investors include Baillie Gifford, Mayfair Equity Partners and M&G Investments, with follow-on investment from existing investors including Merian Chrysalis.
2020
July
Second generation IPU platform, the IPU-Machine M2000, is launched, powered by MK2 GC200 IPU processors and marking an 8x step up in performance.
2020
September
Graphcore launches Partner Program, a global network of channel partners to serve customers around the world.
2020
December
Graphcore introduces first production version of PyTorch for the IPU as part of Poplar SDK release 1.4, enabling users to run standard PyTorch programs on the IPU by changing a few lines of code. New performance benchmarks are announced.
2020
December
Graphcore raises $222m in Series E funding round led by Ontario Teachers’ Pensions Plan Board and is now valued at $2.77bn. Investors include funds managed by Fidelity International and Schroders, and Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit.
Today
With offices in Bristol, London, Cambridge, Palo Alto, Oslo, Beijing, Hsinchu, Seoul, New York, Seattle, Austin, Munich, Paris and Tokyo, Graphcore is enabling innovators worldwide to achieve next generation machine intelligence breakthroughs with our IPU technology.
Nigel is co-founder and CEO at Graphcore. Before founding Graphcore, Nigel was CEO at two VC-backed silicon companies and has led and established multiple semiconductors businesses.
Simon is co-founder, CTO and EVP Engineering at Graphcore and is the original architect of the IPU. He has been designing new processors for emergent workloads for over 30 years.
