AI inference company Groq has closed a $650 million funding round as it pivots its business following a landmark IP licensing agreement with Nvidia. The round was led by Disruptive, a Dallas-based late-stage investment firm whose founder Alex Davis also serves as Groq’s chairman, alongside Fort Lauderdale hedge fund Infinitum.
The raise comes roughly six months after Nvidia licensed Groq’s language processing unit (LPU) technology and hired away founder Jonathan Ross along with president Sunny Madra. Ross, a former Google engineer who helped develop the Tensor Processing Unit, had co-founded Groq a decade ago with Doug Wightman, who remained at the company and stepped up as CEO following the departure.
Groq’s previous valuation stood at $6.9 billion after a $750 million round in September. No new valuation was disclosed.
With its core chip IP now shared with Nvidia, Groq said it is doubling down on its inference cloud business, which now spans 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC, serving over five million developers and processing trillions of tokens weekly.
The company has also rebuilt its leadership team, appointing Alan Rice as COO, Sinclair Schuller as CTO, and Rakesh Malhotra as CPO, all bringing experience from major technology organisations.
