Graphcore
- 🦄Became a unicorn2018
- 📈Peak valuation$2.77 Billion ’20
- 💔Became a Unitard2024
- 💸Last valuation~$554M
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. Glassdoor reviews from the decline recurringly faulted leadership drawn from chip backgrounds for missing the fast-moving ML market and a clear roadmap, with the best engineers leaving before the sale.
Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.
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)
