Graphcore

AI chips / semiconductorsUK

New to Unitard

🤝 Acquired

Peak $2.77 BillionToday

~-80%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2018
📈
Peak valuation
$2.77 Billion ’20
💔
Became a Unitard
2024
💸
Last valuation
~$554M

Current status

Acquired by SoftBank in July 2024 for an estimated $500-600M — about a fifth of its peak.

The rise & fall

6 moments · 2016–2024

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2016

Founded in Bristol

Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles design the IPU — a processor built for AI, billed as Britain's answer to Nvidia.

Wikipedia

2018

Joins the unicorn club

A Series D values the IPU maker above $1B, with Microsoft and BMW joining the cap table.

TechCrunch

Dec 2020

The peak: $2.77B for Britain's Nvidia rival$2.77B

A late-2020 round caps $684M raised from Sequoia, Microsoft and others.

TechCrunch

2022

Nvidia's shadow lengthens

Customers don't materialize and cash burns; Graphcore cuts roughly 20% of staff and closes offices in Norway, Japan and South Korea.

Sifted

2022–24

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–24

Glassdoor reviews from the decline kept returning to the same theme: employees felt leadership drawn from traditional chip backgrounds misread the fast-moving machine-learning market and never set a clear roadmap, and watched the best engineers head for the exit before the sale.

Jul 2024

Acquired by SoftBank for ~$500-600M

SoftBank pays about a fifth of the peak valuation — less than the $684M investors had put in.

TechCrunch

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Graphcore, a Bristol-based designer of the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), was hailed as Britain's best hope to rival Nvidia in AI chips, peaking at $2.77B in late 2020 after raising $684M from Sequoia, Microsoft and others.

But it struggled to win customers as Nvidia's dominance hardened, burned through cash, cut roughly a fifth of its staff and closed offices in Norway, Japan and South Korea. In July 2024 SoftBank bought it for an estimated $500-600M — about a fifth of its peak.

Source: TechCrunch / Sifted / Dealroom ($2.77B peak valuation end-2020; raised $684M from backers incl. Sequoia and Microsoft; cut ~20% of staff and closed offices; SoftBank acquisition ~$500-600M, July 2024)