Groq Secures USD 750 Mn Funding at USD 6.9 Bn Valuation The round, led by Disruptive, drew participation from Blackrock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, and a major US West Coast fund manager.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Artificial intelligence chipmaker Groq has secured USD 750 million in new funding, lifting its post-money valuation to USD 6.9 billion.
The round was led by growth investment firm Disruptive, which contributed nearly USD 350 million. Other notable participants included Blackrock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, and a major US West Coast mutual fund manager.
Existing backers such as Samsung, Cisco, D1, Altimeter, 1789 Capital, and Infinitum also joined.
Founded in 2016, Groq has become a prominent force in the US artificial intelligence ecosystem. Its technology is now used by more than two million developers as well as a wide range of Fortune 500 companies. The company's hardware supports applications in sectors spanning cloud services, autonomous technologies, and enterprise AI solutions.
Groq has emerged as a challenger to NVIDIA's dominance in AI hardware. Its chips, known as LPUs, are designed specifically for inference tasks rather than graphics processing. These units act as inference engines optimised for efficient execution of large models. Compared with conventional GPUs, LPUs can deliver faster processing speeds and reduced energy consumption for certain workloads, particularly large-scale inference.
The company offers its products as both cloud services and on-premises hardware. The latter includes server racks with integrated software and hardware nodes. Both deployment options can run a variety of widely used open AI models, including those developed by Meta, Mistral, Google, and OpenAI. Groq claims its systems can often provide equal or greater performance at lower costs.
The latest investment underscores growing interest in specialised AI hardware. Groq had previously raised USD 640 million at a USD 2.8 billion valuation in August 2024. In less than a year, it has more than doubled its value and now brought its total fundraising to over USD 3 billion.
