Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch

MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.

The company’s goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLMs and delivering results than Nvidia’s GPUs.  

Other investors in the round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, the startup’s founder and CEO Reiner Pope announced Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn.

Although the company didn’t release its latest valuation, Etched, MatX’s closest competitor, raised a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last month. Etched didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

MatX’s latest round comes more than a year after its Series A of about $100 million, which was led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch earlier reported that the 2024 round valued the startup at more than $300 million.

Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Pope led AI software development for Google’s TPUs, the tech giant’s proprietary AI chips. His co-founder, Mike Gunter, was a lead designer of the TPU hardware before leaving to launch the startup.

The new funding will help MatX produce its chips with TSMC, with plans to start shipping them in 2027.