AI Chip Startup Groq Launches New Business Unit and Acquires Definitive Intelligence for Growth

Groq, a pioneering startup specializing in high-performance chips for generative AI models, is setting its sights on expanding into the enterprise and public sector markets. Today, Groq unveiled its new division, Groq Systems, designed to enhance its customer and developer ecosystem significantly. This initiative aims to support organizations, including government agencies, looking to integrate Groq’s advanced chips into their existing data centers or establish new ones using Groq processors.

As part of this strategic move, Groq has acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based company providing a suite of AI solutions tailored for businesses, such as chatbots, data analytics tools, and documentation generators. Sunny Madra, the CEO of Definitive Intelligence, will now lead GroqCloud, Groq’s cloud platform that offers hardware documentation, code samples, and self-service API access to the company’s cloud-hosted accelerators.

“At Groq, we are dedicated to fostering an accessible and affordable AI economy for anyone with a vision,” said Jonathan Ross, Groq co-founder and CEO, in a press release. “We’re thrilled to welcome Sunny and his team from Definitive Intelligence to support our mission. The Definitive team brings valuable expertise in AI solutions and go-to-market strategies and has shown a strong commitment to community knowledge sharing.”

Sunny Madra co-founded Definitive Intelligence in 2022 alongside Gavin Sherry, a former engineering director at EMC. Before launching their new venture, Madra and Sherry co-founded Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems that was acquired by Ford in 2018.

Definitive Intelligence brings a range of business-focused GenAI products to Groq, including OpenAssistants (a collection of open-source libraries for building AI chatbots) and Advisor (a tool that generates visualizations linking enterprise and public databases). Notably, one of its flagship offerings, Pioneer, is an "autonomous data science agent" capable of performing various data analytics tasks, including predictive modeling.

Before the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had successfully raised $25.5 million in venture capital funding.

“The significance of high-speed inference in generative AI is just beginning to be recognized,” said Madra in an emailed statement. “At Groq, we are empowering developers with the speed, low latency, and efficiency necessary to fulfill the potential of generative AI. I’ve admired Groq since my first encounter with Jonathan in 2016, and I am excited to join him and the Groq team in delivering the fastest inference engine globally.”

Founded in 2016, Groq has emerged from stealth mode with its innovative LPU (language processing unit) inference engine. The company asserts that its LPU can execute large language models, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4, at speeds up to 10 times faster.

Ross is renowned for being instrumental in developing Google's tensor processing unit (TPU), a custom AI accelerator chip used to train and deploy AI models.

With the acquisition of Definitive Intelligence, Groq marks its second significant acquisition, following the purchase of Maxeler Technologies, a provider of high-performance computing and AI infrastructure solutions, in 2022. As the custom AI chip market remains fiercely competitive, this move signals Groq's determination to secure its position before rivals can gain a foothold.