AI chip startup Groq announced Wednesday that it has raised $750 million in fresh funding, valuing the company at $6.9 billion post-money.
The round, led by Disruptive with participation from BlackRock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, and others, exceeded earlier reports that suggested Groq was targeting $600 million at a $6 billion valuation. Existing backers including Samsung, Cisco, D1, and Altimeter also joined the round.
The new valuation marks more than a twofold jump from August 2024, when Groq raised $640 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. In total, the company has now secured over $3 billion in funding, according to PitchBook.
Groq is seen as a key challenger to Nvidia, which dominates the AI hardware market with its GPUs. But unlike GPUs, Groq’s chips are LPUs (language processing units), what the company calls an “inference engine”, designed specifically to run AI models faster and more efficiently.
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Its technology is available both as a cloud service and as on-premises hardware clusters, supporting open versions of models from Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Google, and OpenAI. Groq claims its offerings can match or outperform existing solutions while cutting costs.
The company’s rapid growth has also extended to its user base. Groq says it now supports more than 2 million developers, up from just 356,000 developers a year ago.
Groq founder Jonathan Ross previously helped design Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which still powers Google Cloud’s AI services. He founded Groq in 2016, the same year TPUs were announced.
With fresh backing and accelerating adoption, Groq is positioning itself as a serious contender to Nvidia’s dominance in powering the next wave of AI applications.
