MatX, a semiconductor startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised $500 million in a Series B funding round. The investment was led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner.
The company, established in 2023, aims to develop specialised processors for training large language models (LLMs). Its stated goal is to create chips that are ten times better at this task than the current industry-standard graphics processing units (GPUs) supplied by Nvidia.
Major Backers and Competitive Landscape
Other investors in this significant round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. The announcement was made by MatX's founder and CEO, Reiner Pope, in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.
Although MatX did not disclose its latest valuation, its closest competitor, Etched, raised a similar $500 million round last month at a valuation of approximately $5 billion, according to a Bloomberg report.
This latest funding follows MatX's Series A round of about $100 million, led by Spark Capital in 2024, which valued the startup at over $300 million.
Founders' Pedigree and Production Plans
The company's leadership boasts significant experience from Google's in-house chip projects. Before co-founding MatX, CEO Reiner Pope led AI software development for Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). His co-founder, Mike Gunter, was a lead designer of the TPU hardware.
The new capital will be used to manufacture its first chips with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), with plans to begin shipping the processors to customers in 2027.