Groq, the AI chip startup, has announced the formation of a new business unit and the acquisition of Definitive Intelligence

Groq, a startup specializing in chips designed to accelerate generative AI models beyond traditional hardware capabilities, is focusing on serving both the enterprise and public sector markets.

Today, Groq revealed its latest venture with the creation of a new division called Groq Systems, with a strong emphasis on broadening its customer and developer community. Groq Systems caters to organizations, including government agencies, looking to integrate Groq’s chips into their current data centers or construct new data centers with Groq processors.

With the acquisition of Definitive Intelligence, Groq has expanded its portfolio to include various business-oriented AI solutions such as chatbots, data analytics tools, and documentation builders. Sunny Madra, CEO of Definitive Intelligence, has taken the helm at GroqCloud, Groq’s cloud platform offering hardware documentation, code samples, and self-serve API access to the company’s cloud-hosted accelerators.

“At Groq, our goal is to establish an AI economy that is within reach and cost-effective for individuals with innovative concepts,” stated Jonathan Ross, co-founder and CEO of Groq, in a press release. “We are thrilled to have Sunny and his team from Definitive Intelligence on board to assist us in accomplishing this goal… The team at Definitive possesses a wealth of knowledge in AI solutions and go-to-market strategies, along with a strong commitment to sharing their expertise with the community.

In 2022, Madra and Gavin Sherry co-founded Definitive Intelligence. Sherry was previously the director of engineering at EMC. Before starting Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Sherry founded Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems that Ford acquired in 2018.

Definitive Intelligence provides a variety of business-focused GenAI solutions, such as OpenAssistants for creating AI chatbots using open source libraries and Advisor for generating visualizations linked to different databases. Definitive’s top tool is Pioneer, a “autonomous data science agent” created to manage a range of data analytics tasks, such as predictive modeling.

Before being acquired, Definitive Intelligence had secured $25.5 million in venture capital funding.

“The significance of high-speed inference to generative AI is becoming increasingly apparent,” Madra stated in an email. At Groq, developers are provided with the speed, low latency, and efficiency necessary to fulfill the generative AI promise. I’ve been a huge supporter of Groq since my initial encounter with Jonathan in 2016, and I am excited to be part of their mission to deliver the most rapid inference engine to the global community.

Groq, which surfaced in 2016, is developing an LPU (language processing unit) inference engine. According to the company, their LPU is capable of running current large language models, which are similar in structure to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4, at a speed 10 times faster.

Ross is known for his contribution to the creation of the tensor processing unit (TPU), Google’s specialized AI accelerator chip utilized for training and running models.

Definitive Intelligence marks Groq’s second acquisition following Maxeler Technologies, a company specializing in high-performance compute and AI infrastructure solutions, in 2022. There is a possibility that it won’t be the final one. The custom AI chip market is fiercely competitive, and Groq’s recent purchase indicates a strategic move to secure a leading position ahead of its competitors.