By Max A. Cherney
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 15 (Reuters) – Chip-design startup Bolt Graphics is seeking to raise roughly $100 million at a valuation of about $700 million as part of an effort to make a graphics chip to compete with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The thirst for AI computing and the financial frenzy surrounding it poured billions of dollars of profit into the likes of Nvidia and AMD, which have in turn focused their efforts on improving the underlying hardware. Bolt is seeking to design chips that will focus on non-AI areas such as the high-precision calculations supercomputers perform and graphics for videogames.
The fundraising effort is ongoing and the amount of capital and valuation Bolt is seeking could change, the people said. Reuters could not learn which investors were leading the funding round.
The funding could test whether investors have the appetite to back chip startups that plan to tackle problems outside of the AI-focused products that Nvidia and AMD have poured billions of dollars into developing.
Bolt CEO Darwesh Singh declined to comment on the funding round or terms but said the fundraising is “well under way.”
The Silicon Valley-based startup is initially targeting fewer applications and plans to focus on professional markets such as 3D artists and game developers first and then expand into gaming graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the future. Making a videogame chip can be complex because of the amount of software needed to support the thousands of titles that any new hardware should support.
ZEUS CHIP TARGETS SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING
This week, Bolt completed the first round of testing for its Zeus GPU architecture that it is aiming to design for physics simulation. The company plans to produce the final chip on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s process. Bolt is designing the Zeus chip for scientific computing, chip design and professional rendering — which includes some tasks that require higher-precision calculations known as FP64.
Over the last 10 years, venture capital firms have been reluctant to back chip startups because of large costs associated with producing a cutting-edge chip and the length of time it takes to jump start a business. Bolt has been working on its chips and hardware for roughly six years.
AI investments have captured an enormous amount of attention this year so far, especially in the chip industry. Investors put about $10.7 billion into semiconductor startups in the first five months of 2026, on a pace to exceed the $12.2 billion raised globally in all of 2025, according to Crunchbase data.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
