Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger reinvents himself as an angel investor in AI startup Fractile
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger reinvents himself as an angel investor in AI startup Fractile
The British startup, backed by $15M in funding, aims to revolutionize low-cost AI inferencing with innovative chip technology.
Pat Gelsinger, until recently the CEO of Intel, has transitioned into the role of angel investor. In a post on his X account, Gelsinger announced his participation in a Seed funding round for a British artificial intelligence chip startup called Fractile.ai. To date, the startup has raised capital from the British innovation authorities and secured $15 million from several venture capital funds, including the NATO Innovation Fund.
Ironically, Fractile.ai operates in a sector where Intel struggled to establish a significant presence and compete with Nvidia. The startup's founding team and senior employees include veterans of Nvidia and Arm—two companies that have outpaced Intel in developing chips for artificial intelligence applications.
“Having looked at many approaches to AI acceleration, the increasing and what will be dominance of low-cost inferencing is... aiming ahead of where AI is today. We need orders of magnitude cost and power reductions to make AI useful at scale. No approach has me more enthused than Fractile.ai, which is tackling in memory compute and leveraging semiconductors circuits in powerful ways,” Gelsinger wrote. “In fact, some of my ideas I was exploring in my graduate work of four decades ago might finally come to mainstream AI computing!”
Gelsinger’s departure from Intel at the end of 2024 followed his inability to turn around the processor giant. His ambitious plans to revitalize Intel through advanced manufacturing and AI technologies struggled to materialize, prompting the company to focus on strategic realignments that resulted in large-scale layoffs and delays in factory projects in Europe and Asia.
