Groq funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Groq designs a chip called the LPU, short for language processing unit, built to run AI models rather than train them. That step is called inference: each time someone sends a prompt to a chatbot, a chip somewhere works out the answer. Groq sells inference through GroqCloud, a service developers pay to run open models such as Llama on Groq's hardware. It is a different company from Grok, the chatbot made by Elon Musk's xAI.

Groq has raised about $2.75 billion across seven rounds since 2016. In December 2025, Nvidia agreed to license Groq's technology and hire its founder in a deal reported at about $20 billion, and most of that money went straight to Groq's shareholders.

What remains is a smaller Groq that runs data centers and now buys systems from Nvidia, the company that licensed its chip. It raised $1 billion in 2026 at about half its old price. Let's dive into Groq's funding history.

Groq's funding falls into three eras. A single venture firm carried it through its first years, growth funds paid for the inference boom, and a reset after the Nvidia deal started a second company under the same name.

The total leaves out two large deals that were not funding rounds. Saudi Arabia's $1.5 billion commitment in February 2025 paid for data center capacity in the kingdom. Nvidia's December 2025 payment bought a license and a team, and most of it passed through to shareholders.

Jonathan Ross helped create the Tensor Processing Unit, Google's in-house AI chip. He left Google in 2016 and started Groq with Douglas Wightman, a former engineer at Google X, who was its first CEO.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Social Capital wrote the first check. Groq's SEC filing shows about $10.3 million sold from October 2016, and Social Capital led a second raise in 2018 of about $52.3 million against a $60 million target. Wightman left in 2019, and Ross ran the company from then on.

Groq's Series C came together from the second half of 2020 and closed in April 2021. Tiger Global and D1 Capital Partners led the $300 million round, which made Groq a unicorn, a startup valued at more than $1 billion.

The Series D arrived in August 2024, after ChatGPT turned inference into a large market. BlackRock's private equity arm led the $640 million round, and Groq said it raised twice what it had set out to. Cisco, Samsung, and the Japanese telecom company KDDI came in as strategic investors.

In September 2025, Disruptive led a $750 million round that more than doubled Groq's valuation. Reports in July had pointed to about $600 million at a $6 billion valuation, so the final round came in larger and at a higher price.

Three months later, on December 24, 2025, Groq and Nvidia announced a non-exclusive license for Groq's inference technology. Ross, president Sunny Madra, and most of the staff moved to Nvidia, and Groq said it would carry on as an independent company with GroqCloud. Alex Davis, Disruptive's founder, told CNBC that Nvidia was paying about $20 billion in cash.

Groq's shareholders received most of that money. Axios reported that about 85% was paid up front, 10% in mid-2026, and the rest at the end of 2026, and that about 90% of employees were joining Nvidia.

The company that stayed behind had three CEOs within a year. Chief financial officer Simon Edwards took over in December, then left in March 2026 to become CFO of Bloom Energy. Adam Winter, who had run Groq's international business, now leads it.

That company then raised again. Existing shareholders were offered a pro rata share of a $650 million round, with Disruptive and Infinitum committed to cover any part left unfilled. Axios described it as a chance to invest in a new company once the final Nvidia payments arrived.

Groq called the August round its Series A, the label startups normally give a first major round. Disruptive led it, and Nvidia agreed to take part.

Groq's valuation climbed for four years, peaked in a license sale rather than a funding round, and then reset to about half its last venture price.

The price rose about 2.5 times between the Series D and the Series E. Groq's developer count grew faster, from about 356,000 to more than 2 million over roughly the same year.

Nvidia then paid close to three times the September 2025 price. Nvidia's annual report lists $13 billion paid at closing and $4 billion due within a year, and says it bought no shares, no customer contracts, and no products. It booked most of the cost as goodwill, which it tied mainly to the employees it hired.

The $3.5 billion Series A price belongs to a different business. Groq kept GroqCloud and its data centers, while the people who designed its chips now work at Nvidia. Who holds the remaining equity is covered in how Groq's ownership is split.

Groq's cap table runs from one early venture firm to growth funds, chip and telecom companies, and finally its own licensee.

Disruptive, a Dallas growth fund founded by Alex Davis, is Groq's most important investor today. It led the September 2025 round and both 2026 rounds, and Davis is Groq's executive chairman.

Davis told CNBC in December 2025 that Disruptive had put more than half a billion dollars into Groq. That made it one of the biggest winners of the Nvidia payout, and it is now the main backer of the company that remains.

Social Capital funded Groq when it was a handful of former Google engineers with a chip design. Its two checks, about $62 million in total, came years before inference was a market.

Social Capital still appeared on Axios's list of Groq backers at the time of the Nvidia deal. It has not been named in the 2026 rounds.

Tiger Global and D1 Capital Partners co-led the 2021 Series C. D1 returned in 2025, and Infinitum, a Fort Lauderdale hedge fund that joined as a follow-on investor in 2021, co-led the June 2026 round.

BlackRock led the 2024 round and returned in 2025 alongside Neuberger Berman and Altimeter. 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, joined in 2025.

Samsung, Cisco, KDDI, and Deutsche Telekom invested through their venture arms. Each sells chips, networking gear, or telecom capacity that AI services depend on, so a stake in Groq doubled as a bet on more demand for their own products.

Samsung invested through its Catalyst Fund in 2024 and again in 2025. Behind that stake sits Samsung's family-controlled ownership, in which the Lee family steers the group through a chain of affiliates.

Nvidia went from Groq's main rival to its licensee, and now to a planned investor in the Series A. It is also a supplier: Groq became an Nvidia Cloud Partner in August 2026 and plans to deploy Nvidia's Groq 3 LPX racks, which use the chip design Groq licensed out.

For Nvidia, the deal adds a low-latency inference chip to the GPUs that drive Nvidia's chip-selling business. The structure, a license plus a team rather than a purchase, follows other Big Tech deals of 2025, including Meta's deal for Scale AI.

Groq spent its first $1.75 billion building chips and the data centers to run them. The 2026 money goes mostly to data centers filled with Nvidia hardware.

Until 2025, most of Groq's spending went to the LPU. The chip keeps the model's working data in fast on-chip memory, which lets it answer quickly, but it takes many chips to hold one large model.

The 2024 Series D was meant to fund the next two generations of the LPU. That design work now sits with Nvidia, which unveiled the Groq 3 LPX system at its GTC conference in March 2026.

GroqCloud makes money by charging developers per token, the small chunks of text a model reads and writes. That requires data centers, and Groq has built or leased capacity across 13 sites in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, including Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Helsinki, and Sydney.

Building that capacity has been slow. The Information reported in July 2025 that Groq had cut its 2025 revenue forecast from more than $2 billion to more than $500 million, citing delays in getting data center capacity.

Groq now runs about 54 megawatts and plans to pass 200 megawatts in 2027. The June round pays to fit existing sites with Nvidia's LPX systems, and the Series A supports Nvidia GPU clusters for customers running and training models.

Groq bought Definitive Intelligence, Sunny Madra's data analytics startup, in 2024, and Madra went on to run GroqCloud. After the Nvidia deal, Groq had to rebuild its leadership team.

It hired Alan Rice, formerly of xAI and Meta, as chief operating officer. Sinclair Schuller and Rakesh Malhotra, who co-founded the software firm Nuvalence, joined as chief technology officer and chief product officer.

Groq now sells computing time rather than chips. It wants to rent inference capacity to model makers, Fortune 500 companies, and AI startups across its 13 data centers, and its developer count reached more than 6 million in August 2026. That puts it in competition with GPU clouds and inference startups whose investors keep raising, including Baseten's recent funding rounds and Fireworks AI's funding history.

The product plan depends on Nvidia. Groq says it will be among the first to bring Nvidia's Groq 3 LPX and Vera Rubin NVL72 systems to market, built with Dell, alongside its own LPUs. Rival chipmaker Cerebras took the opposite path, staying independent and listing in May 2026, a contrast visible in Cerebras's ownership structure.

Groq has no IPO plans. The main risks are that its old edge, a faster chip, is now available to anyone who buys from Nvidia, and that it runs the business with a leadership team assembled in 2026. The $1 billion raised this year pays for the move from 54 to 200 megawatts, and Groq's next valuation will depend on how much of that capacity it can fill.

Groq has raised about $2.75 billion across seven rounds since 2016. That includes $1 billion raised in 2026 after its Nvidia deal. The total excludes Saudi Arabia's $1.5 billion infrastructure commitment and the roughly $20 billion Nvidia paid for its license and team.

Groq's lead investors are Disruptive, Social Capital, BlackRock, Tiger Global, D1 Capital Partners, and Infinitum. Other backers include Neuberger Berman, Altimeter, 1789 Capital, Samsung, Cisco, KDDI, and Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners. Nvidia plans to invest in the 2026 Series A.

Groq was valued at $3.5 billion in its August 2026 Series A. That is about half the $6.9 billion valuation of September 2025. Nvidia's deal in December 2025 was priced at about $20 billion, but it was a license and hiring deal, not a purchase of Groq's shares.

No. Groq is private and has not filed for an IPO. Nvidia licensed its technology but did not acquire the company.

Groq is owned by its venture investors, employees, and the shareholders who reinvested after the Nvidia deal. Disruptive, whose founder Alex Davis chairs the board, led both 2026 rounds and is the most influential holder. Founder Jonathan Ross left for Nvidia in December 2025, and exact stakes are not public.