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
🌱
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
🦄
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
📈
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
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
🤝
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)
Founders
Nigel Toon
Co-founder & CEO
Still there — Co-founder & Exec Chair · LinkedIn ↗
SK
Simon Knowles
co-founder & CTO
No public profile matched
Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.
