“We have a chance to build Britain’s first one trillion dollar company,” says executive at top UK chip startup

A top executive at one of the UK‘s hottest AI startups has made the bold claim that it has the potential to be Britain's first one trillion dollar company. Carmen Alfonso Rico is a VC-turned-angel investor-turned operator. Rico, who started her own VC fund, Cocoa Ventures, in 2021, joined UK chip startup Fractile, a UK startup that designs chips for AI inference, the process of running an AI model, in June this year.

Cocoa Ventures, which has raised a $17m and $23m fund, invested in Fractile in a 2024 funding round. Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, Rico, who has joined Fractile as VP of business operations, issued the bold claim about its potential to be a one trillion dollar company, as she set out Fractile’s potential as it looks to take on chip titan Nvidia.

Rico said that Fractile had "a unique chance to build Britain's first one trillion dollar company" should it win the AI hardware war. However, the startup, which has yet to launch a commercial product, still has some way to go to become a double-digit billion dollar company, let alone a trillion dollar company.

Fractile, which is also backed by Accel and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, is reportedly raising $600m at a $5.6bn valuation, according to Bloomberg, and has also reportedly signed a deal to sell its chips to Anthropic. Rico talks about why she decided to take the full-time role at Fractile, which she is undertaking at the same time as overseeing Cocoa Ventures, although a Cocoa Ventures executive will now run its day to day operations.

Rico pitched it as a move which will benefit Cocoa Ventures and its other portfolio companies, highlighting the experience and access the operator role will grant her.

She said: "I have a better network. I am going to support the portfolio because of the place that Fractile operates in the world.”

Rico said she had no pushback from portfolio companies to the move, saying she is always available to them. Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile’s architecture keeps data directly on the chip, unlike standard chips that must constantly shuttle data between the processor and separate memory modules.

It says this method can run LLMs up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while lowering operational costs by 90 per cent. Fractile's specialised chips are expected to be ready for data centre deployment in 2027.