MatX, a chip startup established by two former Google hardware engineers, has secured a $500 million Series B funding round led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund created by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.
The aim of the company is to develop processors that are 10 times more efficient in training LLMs and delivering results compared to Nvidia’s GPUs.
Additional investors in this round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, as announced by the startup’s founder and CEO Reiner Pope on Tuesday in a LinkedIn post.
While the latest valuation for the company was not disclosed, MatX’s closest competitor, Etched, raised a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg last month. Etched did not provide a comment when solicited.
MatX’s latest funding round follows its Series A of about $100 million over a year ago, led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch previously reported that the 2024 round valued the startup at over $300 million.
Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Pope was responsible for AI software development for Google’s TPUs, the company’s proprietary AI chips. His co-founder, Mike Gunter, was a lead designer of the TPU hardware before leaving to start the venture.
The new funding will enable MatX to manufacture its chips in collaboration with TSMC, with an aim to start shipping them in 2027.
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