“We have a chance to build Britain’s first one trillion dollar company,” says executive at top UK chip startup

A top executive at a leading AI startup in the UK has boldly claimed that the company could potentially become Britain's first trillion-dollar business. Carmen Alfonso Rico, a former VC fund manager and angel investor, joined UK chip startup Fractile in June as its VP of business operations. Fractile, which designs chips for AI inference, aims to challenge industry giant Nvidia.

Rico, who founded her own VC fund, Cocoa Ventures, in 2021, stated that Fractile possesses the unique opportunity to construct Britain's first trillion-dollar company, should it emerge victorious in the AI hardware race. However, it's important to note that Fractile has yet to launch a commercial product and still needs to achieve double-digit billion-dollar status before potentially becoming a trillion-dollar company.

The startup, supported by Accel and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, is reportedly raising $600 million at a $5.6 billion valuation. Additionally, Fractile has already struck a deal to sell its chips to Anthropic. Rico elaborated on her decision to take on the full-time role at Fractile while simultaneously managing Cocoa Ventures, emphasizing that it will benefit both her portfolio and the company's progress in the AI hardware market.

She highlighted that her expanded network and access will prove advantageous for Cocoa Ventures and its other investments. Rico assured that she has received no objections from her portfolio companies regarding her new position, noting that she remains accessible to them. Fractile's proprietary chip architecture keeps data directly on the chip, potentially running large language models (LLMs) up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while cutting operational costs by 90%. The company's specialized chips are set to become available for data center deployment in 2027.