AI chipmaker Groq has secured $750 million in fresh funding, valuing the startup at $6.9 billion and more than doubling its worth in just a year.
The round, led by Disruptive with backing from BlackRock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and existing investors such as Samsung and Cisco, pushes Groq’s total fundraising above $3 billion, according to PitchBook.
Founded by Jonathan Ross, a former Google engineer behind its Tensor Processing Unit, Groq is pitching itself as a lower-cost alternative to Nvidia.
Its processors, branded as “language processing units” or LPUs, are designed to run AI models faster and more efficiently than traditional graphics chips.
The company’s products are available both as cloud services and as server racks for enterprises, supporting models from Meta, Google, OpenAI and others. Groq says it now powers AI applications for more than 2 million developers, up from 356,000 a year ago.