Tags: Groq

Corporate venture arm TDK Ventures chief Nicolas Sauvage is doubling down on the less glamorous side of artificial intelligence. The French executive, who launched the fund in 2019, has already steered $500 million into inference chips, specialized robots and emerging battery chemistries. His most visible win, Groq’s $6.9 billion‑valued inference processor, exemplifies a strategy that looks four years ahead to bottlenecks and backs founders already solving them. Sauvage now watches CPUs, Chinese “vibe manufacturing” and the quest for dexterous machines as the next sources of competitive advantage. Lire la suite

AI chip startup Groq announced a $750 million financing that lifts its post‑money valuation to $6.9 billion. The round, led by Disruptive with participation from BlackRock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners and existing backers such as Samsung, Cisco and Altimeter, more than doubles the company’s valuation from a year ago. Groq’s LPUs – marketed as inference engines – are positioned as a non‑GPU alternative for AI workloads, and the firm now claims to power the AI applications of over two million developers. Lire la suite