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Accel led the London chip startup’s round, with Pat Gelsinger joining as an angel investor, weeks after Anthropic was reported to be in early discussions to become a customer. Fractile, the London-based startup designing inference chips that put compute and memory on the same die, has raised $220 million to take its hardware to production, […]

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UK company Fractile has today raised a $220M Series B as it continues to build next-generation inference hardware for AI.

The round was led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures and 8VC.

Founded in 2022, Fractile is building next-generation inference hardware for frontier AI. Its thesis is that the next major limit on AI progress is the time and cost required to produce useful outputs at scale.

As advanced AI systems take on harder, longer-running tasks that can require tens of millions of tokens to generate, Fractile is developing chips and systems designed to make faster inference economically viable, spanning AI research, chip microarchitecture, and foundry process innovation.

According to a post by Walter Goodwin, CEO and Founder of Fractile, the company was founded on the bet that, eventually, the world’s most capable AI systems would be limited in their impact by the amount of time they take to produce useful outputs. 

“We bet everything on the logical conclusion: that the only way to truly unlock this latent value, to make speed viable at scale, was to radically re-invent the hardware that we run our frontier AI models on.

Ever since, we have been building chips and systems that tackle this problem.”  

He contends that since then, raw AI capability has already reached the point where time from query to output is the key limit to frontier capabilities. As models have improved, so has their ability to be orchestrated over increasingly long output sequences.

However, the unit economics of inference have become a brutal constraint.

“Inference is both the revenue engine of the AI industry and the rate-limiting factor on expanding it.“

He further contends that today’s LLMs are already producing up to 100 million tokens in pursuit of tackling hard problems.:

“At the ~40 tokens per second or so at which these models tend to run on existing chips, a single output of this length takes a month to complete.

The technical and economic limits on inference speed, above all from memory bandwidth that has failed to scale on current architectures, are what is constraining progress.

This is exactly the problem Fractile has been building from the ground up to tackle”. 

Looking ahead, Goodwin sees value in not accelerating today's workloads, but rather in the entirely new workloads that hardware like Fractile will enable.

The company is hiring across London, Bristol, San Francisco, and Taipei. 

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A London-based AI startup set up just months ago, which believes it’s pursuing the fastest path to surpassing human intelligence, has today come out of stealth, having raised over $650m at a $4.65bn valuation.

Called Recursive Superintelligence, the funding round was led by GV, Google’s VC arm, and US VC Greycroft, with participation from chip makers Nvidia and AMD. The disclosure of the funding round, follows previous reports about the expected raise.

Recursive Superintelligence’s “bold bet” is that AI systems will improve themselves by analysing their own performance, without human intervention.

The startup's co-founders include Richard Socher, its CEO, who was previously chief scientist at Salesforce, and Tim Rocktäschel, a professor of AI at London’s UCL and a former Google DeepMind scientist. Others who work at the startup, which has a team of less than 30, previously worked at Meta and OpenAI.

The startup, which was incorporated in London and has offices in London and San Francisco, said a clear trend was emerging in AI.

In a blog post on X, it said: "The fastest path to superintelligence will be realised by AI that recursively improves itself, and does so via open-ended algorithms that drive endless innovation.

“We will first focus on the science of AI itself (by creating AI that improves AI), but the playbook we create will soon allow us to revolutionise every scientific discipline. The potential benefits for humanity of safely creating such an advance cannot be overstated.”

Recursive Superintelligence is one of several new AI startups looking at new ways to make improvements in AI intelligence. These include Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence.

Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz led the round on the back of $2bn+ in 2025 revenue and a $20bn Pentagon enterprise agreement signed in March. Anduril Industries has raised $5 billion in a round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, doubling its valuation to $61 billion eleven months after its previous mark. The Costa […]

Glocalzone, the platform connecting travellers with cross-border delivery requests, has been acquired by MovitOn as part of a deal focused on expanding peer-to-peer logistics infrastructure and integrating decentralised delivery technology.

Founded as a marketplace linking travellers with users seeking international deliveries, Glocalzone has built a network of more than 1.3 million registered users. The platform says it has facilitated over 600,000 delivery orders, with users regularly posting travel routes across destinations including Turkey, Brazil, Mexico and the United States.

MovitOn said the acquisition gives it access to an established international user base while expanding the reach of its decentralised logistics network. The company is developing a delivery platform that combines AI-powered courier matching with blockchain-enabled payment and verification systems.

Following the acquisition, Glocalzone’s platform and user community will be integrated into MovitOn’s decentralised physical infrastructure network (DePIN), which uses smart contracts, escrow systems and token-based transactions to coordinate deliveries and payments.

Doğan Turan, co-founder of Glocalzone, said the integration would combine the company’s existing marketplace with MovitOn’s AI-powered delivery infrastructure.

The synergy between our trusted marketplace and MovitOn’s AI-powered courier-matching system is nothing short of transformative. We’ve spent years building trust among travellers and senders alike, and now, we integrate our 1.3 million users into a DePIN framework powered by smart contracts to eliminate all the pain points of today’s logistics systems. This is the moment peer-to-peer logistics truly goes mainstream and provides a secure, transparent alternative to models of the past.

The integration process will begin immediately, with existing Glocalzone users gradually onboarded into MovitOn’s courier-matching platform, where delivery assignments are determined using factors including route, schedule and user reputation.

The platform will continue operating under the name “Glocalzone by MovitOn” as the companies transition users to the updated infrastructure. MovitOn said loyalty programmes and transition tools will be introduced to support the adoption of its MVON token and broader Web3 payment ecosystem.

Mantle8, a Grenoble, France-based natural hydrogen exploration company, has raised €31 million in Series A funding. This round brings the company’s total funding to €37 million (US$44 million).

The round was led by Sandwater and includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Ecotechnologies 2 fund managed on behalf of the French government by Bpifrance, IP Group, Wind Capital and Calderion (an Audacia-backed investment platform).

Emmanuel Masini, founder and CEO of Mantle8, said, “This raise reflects the growing conviction among leading clean tech investors that natural hydrogen is a resource worth pursuing at scale. The existence of natural hydrogen is a well-established scientific fact; the challenge has been finding free gas accumulations of high-purity hydrogen that are commercially viable. I’m proud that we’ve built and patented an entire technology stack to answer this critical challenge, meeting the expectations of our existing shareholders. 

“The next steps are to identify the prospects in our pipeline that meet our commercial hurdles and drill them. I’m excited to welcome investors who have a long history of involvement in subsurface resources, sovereign investments and ecosystem building.”

Founded in 2019 by Emmanuel Masini, Mantle8 is on a mission to produce commercially viable natural hydrogen by 2030. According to the company, hydrogen is a crucial part of our future decarbonised industrial system; however, the importance of its role will depend on its price and origin. 

Mantle8 claims that its technology for identifying commercially viable natural hydrogen reserves reduces exploration risk and cost, with economic models projecting production costs as low as €0.80/kg. This significantly contributes to a much lower average cost of clean hydrogen supply.

The company believes that this will fundamentally change the hydrogen sector’s economics and will unlock a low-carbon source of sovereign energy supply for Europe as well as other geographies. By partnering with organisations focused on drilling and exploiting target reservoirs, the technology can be rolled out quickly and at scale, says Mantle8. 

The company develops proprietary subsurface modelling and exploration technologies, including HOREX®, a multiphysics platform that produces 4D images of active underground hydrogen systems.

The company’s exploration framework, the Geological Trifecta, identifies reservoirs where an active hydrogen-generating source, continuous replenishment and a sufficiently sealed reservoir converge.

“Emmanuel and his team have built truly proprietary exploration technology, validated it in the field, and now have a clear plan to move into the commercial phase. Natural hydrogen sits at the intersection of energy transition and resource discovery, two areas where Europe must lead as it seeks energy sovereignty. This is a demanding challenge but with the potential to create a new clean energy source, which is what we need and why we see in Mantle8 the opportunity for outsized impact and return,” said Tom Even Mortensen, founder and Managing Partner of Sandwater.

The company plans to deploy this capital during the next two years to fund the world’s most advanced natural hydrogen exploration and drilling campaign. Its technology platform will be employed across its global development pipeline to identify and rank the most promising opportunities. These sites will then be drilled to confirm natural hydrogen accumulations and to evaluate volume, purity, and reservoir quality in support of commercially viable, large-scale production, states Mantle8.

“With this backing, we will work alongside industrial partners globally to move from exploration through to commercial development. The next two years are about proving that the active hydrogen systems our technology has pinpointed can deliver sustained, commercially viable flow,” said Bart Markus, Mantle8’s chairperson. 

In 2025, the company raised a €3.4 million Seed round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. It then went on to complete the world’s first 4D imaging of an active underground natural hydrogen system using HOREX® at its Hydrogeco project in the French Pyrenees. Earlier this year, Mantle8 received a €2.06 million grant from the EU Just Transition Fund to industrialise its core exploration technologies.

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Beijing’s foreign ministry hit the MATCH Act on the eve of the Xi summit, with a 150-day alignment deadline for Japan and the Netherlands at the heart of the legislation Beijing has sharpened its criticism of US legislation that would tighten controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, on the morning Donald Trump arrived in the Chinese […]