Spark Capital led the investment, valuing the company at a pre-money valuation in the mid-$200 million range and a post-money valuation in the low $300 million range, a person who reviewed the deal told TechCrunch. MatX was co-founded two years ago by Mike Gunter, who previously worked at Google on the design of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the tech giant's AI chips, and Reiner Pope, who also came from Google's TPU team, where he wrote AI software. Gunter and Pope hope to help ease the shortage of chips designed to handle AI workloads. They say the sweet spot for their chips are AI workloads of 'at least' 7 billion, and 'ideally' 20 billion or more activated parameters. And they boast that their chips deliver high performance at more affordable prices, according to MatX's website. The startup says its chips are particularly good at scaling to large clusters because of MatX's advanced interconnect, aka the communication pathways that AI chips use to transfer information. The pair...
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