Fractile: Silicon and infrastructure to smash AI’s hardware bottleneck

AI is no longer the future – it’s already reshaping how we live, work, and interact. But as demand accelerates, a critical bottleneck is emerging: AI models are evolving and demanding scale faster than the hardware they run on. That’s where Oxford-founded chip manufacturer Fractile comes in.

Founded by visionary engineer and scientist Walter Goodwin after completing his PhD in robotics, Fractile is redesigning the core infrastructure of AI – building silicon and software specifically engineered for the scale, speed, and complexity of next-generation models.

It’s an audacious vision: to challenge the dominance of NVIDIA, AMD, and other chip giants with a new kind of architecture. One that could run trained AI models up to 50x faster, at 10% of the cost.

Backed by OSE since day one, Fractile has already raised $25m, including investment from Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund, and former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. Fractile is on track to manufacture its first chips in 2026.

WHY IT MATTERS

Today’s AI runs on GPUs, descendants of chips originally designed for video games – not for powering large language models or generative AI. These legacy chips are becoming a limiting factor: expensive, energy-hungry, and in short supply.

Without a leap forward in hardware, progress will stall. Costs will stay high. Energy use will soar. And access will remain limited to the few.

Fractile aims to change that. Its mission is to make high-performance AI radically faster, more affordable, and accessible across sectors, geographies, and real-world applications.

Fractile’s AI accelerator hardware is uniquely equipped to meet the unending growth in demand for increased performance and capacity of AI compute.

Walter Goodwin
Founder and CEO, Fractile

A FLAGSHIP OF OSE’S MISSION

Fractile is a flagship example of why OSE exists: to find high-potential science, back exceptional founders, and help build companies with the potential to change the world and reach billion-dollar scale.

As AI moves from hype to reality, Fractile is building the core infrastructure to power that transition. It’s a transformational company with the ambition to define not just a sector, but an era.

Because the future of AI can’t run on yesterday’s hardware.

Being backed by OSE from the start has enabled our incredible journey from founding to fabrication in just three years. Ambitious deep tech projects like Fractile require long-term backers with shared vision, and OSE have supported us at every step.

Walter Goodwin
Founder and CEO, Fractile

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