Graphcore

Graphcore provides a microprocessor for AI and ML applications (dubbed intelligence processing units [IPU]) that allows developers to build, train, and deploy AI/ML models in the cloud using its Bow Pod hardware systems, which are designed for production deployment in enterprise data centers, private, or public cloud. The Bow IP‍U‍ is also the world’s first AI processor to use Wafer-on-Wafer (WoW) 3D stacking technology, delivering 350 teraFLOPS of AI compute.

In addition, the company’s Poplar graph framework software is designed with the IPU and integrates with ML frameworks to port existing models and run AI applications. Graphcore also provides a set of open-source code graph libraries to support ML models and an engine that executes models and streams data through models running on IPUs.

As of January 2024, Graphcore operated in the UK, US, Germany, Poland, and China.

Key customers and partnerships

The company serves customers in the finance, biotech, research, and consumer internet sectors. Notable customers include Citadel, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, Carmot Capital, and Stanford Medicine.

It partnered with Spell, a company specializing in operationalizing AI, to develop IPU-based infrastructure that allows developers to run AI applications quickly and easily at scale. In addition, it collaborated with Aleph Alpha to enable bulk semantic embedding on the latter’s Luminous-Explore model supporting semantic search.

Funding and financials

In December 2020, the company raised USD 222 million in a Series E funding round led by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board at a valuation of USD 2.77 billion. The funds were used to accelerate future IPU silicon, systems, and software development and drive further global expansion.

In 2022, the company reported revenue of GBP 2.7 million (USD 3.3 million), 46% lower than the previous year, and its net losses worsened 18.4% YoY to GBP 198.8 million (USD 245.9 million).