MOUNTAIN VIEW — Groq, a leader in fast AI inference, has secured a massive $640 million Series D round giving the company a valuation of $2.8 billion. 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, Type One Ventures, and strategic investors including Cisco Investments, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
“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 Center 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 leads 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.
“I am delighted to be at Groq at this pivotal moment. We have the technology, the talent, and the market position to rapidly scale our capacity and deliver inference deployment economics for developers as well as for Groq,” said Stuart Pann, Chief Operating Officer at Groq.
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.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Meta recently shared in his letter entitled, Open Source AI Is the Path Forward,”Innovators like Groq have built low-latency, low-cost inference serving for all the new models.”
