Nigel Toon began his career at Altera, where he spent about 13 years. In 2002 he co-founded Icera, then became CEO of Picochip and of XMOS. Icera was later sold to NVIDIA in 2011.
Graphcore's idea was incubated inside XMOS, where Toon was CEO, and became its own company in 2016 with Simon Knowles as CTO. The first round was led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Atomico led a Series B in July 2017, followed by $50m from Sequoia Capital.
In December 2018 Graphcore raised $200m at a $1.7bn valuation from Microsoft, Samsung and Dell Technologies, becoming the first European AI chip firm to reach unicorn status. A $222m round in late 2020 valued it at $2.8bn.
In 2022 revenue was $2.7m against a net loss of $205m. Meta acquired its AI networking team in early 2023. In July 2024 SoftBank agreed to buy Graphcore for about $500m. The University of Bristol gave Toon an honorary Doctor of Science in 2023.