UK-based AI chipmaker Graphcore scores $200 million in funding from BMW, Microsoft and others at a $1.7 billion valuation

Bristol, UK-based semiconductor company Graphcore has raised $200 million in a new equity funding round from investors including Atomico, Microsoft and BMW i Ventures, valuing the company at $1.5 billion pre-money (via FT). 

Graphcore, which had raised roughly $100 million before this round, designs chips for for artificial intelligence applications and says it recently started generating revenue from its processors.

Goldman Sachs helped Graphcore close the round.

From Graphcore co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon's blog post:

"With this new capital we will be working hard to rapidly scale up the company. We will be hiring lots of new engineers to our headquarters in Bristol, UK and to our offices in London, to Oslo in Norway, Palo Alto in Silicon Valley and to new offices that we are opening in Beijing, China and in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

We will be ramping up our production and will be adding to our sales, marketing, finance, legal and people teams. Our goal is to build the global market leader in machine intelligence hardware and we are looking forward to an exciting new period of massive growth."