Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger invests in UK AI startup Fractile

Pat Gelsinger, who recently quit as CEO of chip giant Intel, has said he has made an investment in compute-in-memory startup Fractile Ltd. (London).

In July 2024 Fractile announced it had raised US$15 million to support the development of its in-memory AI compute that it claims can run the latest AI models at least 100x faster and 10x cheaper.

That funding round was co-led by Kindred Capital, NATO Innovation Fund, and Oxford Science Enterprises, alongside leading angel investors including Herman Hauser of ASM, Stan Boland formerly of Icera and Five.ai and Amar Shah of Wayve.

In a Linkedin posting Gelsinger said that inference of the latest AI models is bottlenecked by hardware and that the coming generation of reasoning models will compound the problem. “To achieve our aspirations for AI, we will need radically faster, cheaper and much lower power inference,” he said.

He added that Fractile’s in-memory compute approach to inference acceleration overcomes the memory bottleneck that holds back GPUs, while decimating power consumption.

“I look forward to advising the Fractile team as they tackle this vital challenge. Cheering you on Walter Goodwin and team,” concluded Gelsinger.

Goodwin is the CEO and founder of Fractile; an engineering graduate from Oxford University who earned a Ph.D with research on applied intelligence in 2022 and robotics. Fractile was founded as Neu-Edge Ltd. in May 2022 before a name change in August 2023.

It remains to be seen whether with this announcement Gelsinger, aged 63, is effectively kick-starting a career as venture capitalist, after many years in senior executive positions and a CEO in the technology industry.