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British AI chip startup Fractile has raised a $720 million Series C, making it one of the top-funded companies building purpose-built AI chips. TechCrunch reported the round on November 11, 2026. The round is backed by Britain's Sovereign AI Fund and led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint. The British government said the company's valuation was over £5 billion, and TechCrunch noted that this could be about $7 billion, a figure reported by the Financial Times and a Reuters source. Fractile's peers in the race for purpose-built chips include Axelera, Etched and OLIX. Such chips aim to reduce the cost of inference, the running of increasingly demanding AI models in production. Fractile differs by pursuing a full-stack approach that includes a machine learning compiler meant to speed up how large language models run on its chips. Its main differentiator is its hardware design, which after a pivot uses stacked DRAM intended to avoid the usual tradeoff between memory and capacity, a tradeoff TechCrunch said has grown more pressing with agentic AI. In a LinkedIn post, CEO Walter Goodwin wrote that there is still a lot of work ahead and that the funding will let the startup ship its first chips and systems next year.