MatX, a semiconductor startup founded by former Google hardware engineers, has secured $500 million in a Series B funding round led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund created by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. Additional investors in the round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison.
The announcement was made by company Founder and CEO Reiner Pope in a LinkedIn post. Although MatX did not disclose its latest valuation, its competitor Etched reportedly raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in a recent funding round.
Founded in 2023, MatX aims to design processors optimized for training large language models and delivering faster AI results. The company is working to build chips capable of outperforming current graphics processors used in AI computing, particularly those produced by Nvidia. Pope previously led AI software development for Google’s tensor processing units, while co-founder Mike Gunter worked as a lead designer of TPU hardware at Google before launching the startup. The new funding follows a roughly $100 million Series A round in 2024 led by Spark Capital, which valued the company at over $300 million. MatX plans to manufacture its processors through TSMC, with shipments expected to begin in 2027.