Former Google Engineers’ Startup MatX secures $50 million investment

Staff Report: PNN

The AI chip startup MatX, aiming to create processors for artificial intelligence, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by trading firm Jane Street and a fund established by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Ashenbrener, called Situational Awareness.

The company’s goal is to develop a processor capable of training large language models (LLMs) and delivering results with ten times the efficiency of current market leader NVIDIA’s GPUs.

Other participants in this funding round include Marvel Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison. MatX founder and CEO Reiner Pope confirmed this in a LinkedIn post.

The company has not disclosed its latest valuation. According to market analysts, MatX’s close competitor Etched recently raised $50 million and achieved a valuation of nearly $5 billion. Previously, in 2024, MatX raised around $10 million in Series A funding, led by Spark Capital, at which time the company’s valuation was over $30 million.

Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Reiner Pope led Google’s AI chip TPU software development division. His co-founder Mike Gunther worked as the lead designer for TPU hardware.

With the new investment, MatX plans to manufacture its processors through Taiwan’s top chipmaker TSMC and aims to begin supplying chips to the market by 2027. With the rapid global expansion of AI technology, the demand for high-performance chips is growing. This significant investment by MatX is seen as a crucial step in the future AI infrastructure competition.