Despite a $2.77 billion valuation in late 2020, recent filings have shown that Graphcore has struggled to raise the cash break even, despite axing 20% of its staff and shutting down its Norwegian, Japanese and South Korean operations.
CEO Nigel Toon was optimistic the deal with Softbank would help the chipmaker compete at a global level, but acknowledged it had faced many challenges.
"The piece that surprised us was the speed at which this has taken off, and the scale that is involved," Toon said.
Toon, who will stay in his role as CEO, said the level of investment required to compete with the likes of Nvidia on AI chip technology is “utterly massive”.
He said that Graphcore is a modestly sized company compared to those it competes with, but still believes the UK firm has still gone “toe-to-toe” and built world-class technology.
SoftBank already owns a chip-maker in the form of Arm Holdings, and Toon said that Graphcore planned to work in collaboration with businesses across its new parent companies portfolio.
Despite the UK government’s commitment to making the UK an AI powerhouse, Toon lamented UK pension investment funds willingness to invest in Start-ups.
“There's a massive opportunity here, but there's a lot of structural things that still need to be fixed," he said.
"If you look at where our money came from, some of it came from the UK, but the majority of it came from other regions. That's the reality of it, and that's the piece that we're going to need to fix, going forward."
