AI Acceleration Firm Groq Gets $750m New Funding

Groq is the creator of the Groq "LPU" (Language Processing Unit) which aims to accelerate AI inference by having a purpose built hardware accelerator that is optimised for running pre-trained models. 

Despite the hardware product, or rather in conjunction with it and enabled by it, Groq's approach is "software first" designed to give developers direct control and simplify hardware utilization (compare the Mojo approach). The hardware and software are tightly linked to enable higher performance. 

This tight coupling has an impact on the software stack - whereas Groq has a proprietary stack, Nvidia's GPUs are supported across open source products like PyTorch and TensorFlow.

You could say its sweet spot is low latency AI inference.

Groq's latest funding round of $750m was led by Disruptive. Other VCs participated as well. Its early funding rounds were from Social Capital (Series A and B) and TDK Ventures (Series B), the corporate venture capital arm of TDK Corporation.