MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B funding round led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.
The ambitious startup aims to make its processors ten times better at training large language models 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 Pop,e announced Tuesday in a LinkedIn post.
Although the company didn’t disclose its latest valuation, Bloomberg reported last month that Etched, MatX’s closest competitor, raised a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation. Etched didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
MatX’s latest round comes just over a year after its roughly $100 million Series A, which was led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch previously reported that the 2024 round valued the startup at over $300 izigidi.
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.