Groq, a leader in fast AI inference, has secured a $640M Series D round at a valuation of $2.8B. The round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners with participation from both existing and new investors, including Neuberger Berman and Type One Ventures, and strategic investors, including Cisco Investments, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
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The unique, vertically integrated Groq AI inference platform has generated skyrocketing demand from developers seeking exceptional speed.
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“The market for AI compute is meaningful, and Groq’s vertically integrated solution is well positioned to meet this opportunity. We look forward to supporting Groq as they scale to meet demand and accelerate their innovation further,” said Samir Menon, Managing Director, BlackRock Private Equity Partners.
“Samsung Catalyst Fund is excited to support Groq,” said Marco Chisari, Head of Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Centre and EVP of Samsung Electronics. “We are highly impressed by Groq’s disruptive compute architecture and their software-first approach. Groq’s record-breaking speed and near-instant generative AI inference performance lead the market.”
“You can’t power AI without inference compute,” said Jonathan Ross, CEO and Founder of Groq. “We intend to make the resources available so that anyone can create cutting-edge AI products, not just the largest tech companies. This funding will enable us to deploy more than 100,000 additional LPUs into GroqCloud. Training AI models is solved; now it’s time to deploy these models so the world can use them. Having secured twice the funding sought, we now plan to significantly expand our talent density. We’re the team enabling hundreds of thousands of developers to build on open models, and we’re hiring.”
Groq also announced that Stuart Pann, formerly a senior executive from HP and Intel, joined its leadership team as Chief Operating Officer. Groq also gains the world-class expertise of its newest technical advisor, Yann LeCun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
Groq has quickly grown to over 360,000 developers building on GroqCloud, creating AI applications on openly available models such as Llama 3.1 from Meta, Whisper Large V3 from OpenAI, Gemma from Google, and Mixtral from Mistral. Groq will use the funding to scale the capacity of its tokens-as-a-service (TaaS) offering and add new models and features to GroqCloud.
As Gen AI applications move from training to deployment, developers and enterprises require an inference strategy that meets the user and market need for speed. The tsunami of developers flocking to Groq are creating a wide range of new and creative AI applications and models, fuelled by Groq instant speed.
Mohsen Moazami, President of International at Groq and former leader of Emerging Markets at Cisco, is leading commercial efforts with enterprises and partners including Aramco Digital and Earth Wind & Power to build out AI compute centres globally. This will ensure developers have access to Groq technology regardless of their location.
“Aramco Digital is partnering with Groq to build one of the largest AI Inference-as-a-Service compute infrastructures in the MENA region,” said Tareq Amin, Chief Executive Officer, Aramco Digital. “Our close collaboration with Groq is transformational for both domestic and global AI demand.”
About Groq
Founded in 2016, Groq builds fast AI inference technology. Groq® LPU AI inference technology is a hardware and software platform that delivers exceptional AI compute speed, quality, and energy efficiency. Groq, headquartered in Silicon Valley, provides cloud and on-prem solutions at scale for AI applications. The LPU and related systems are designed and manufactured in North America.
