The man who built Groq handed its technology to NVIDIA, now his old company raised $650M to fight back without him — TFN

Groq has raised $650 million to scale its AI inference cloud — months after its founder, Jonathan Ross, and most of its senior engineering team departed for NVIDIA in a $20 billion licensing deal.

Led by Disruptive and Infinitum, the round backs a reconstituted Groq under interim CEO Adam Winter as it bets the inference market will dwarf AI training.

The global AI inference market is projected to grow from $106 billion in 2025 to $255 billion by 2030, according to MarketsandMarkets

In December 2025, Jonathan Ross — the engineer who co-developed Google’s tensor processing unit and founded Groq in 2016 — agreed to join NVIDIA as part of a $20 billion licensing deal. He took Groq’s president, Sunny Madra, and approximately 90% of the company’s engineering team with him. Six months later, the company he left behind has raised $650 million to build the AI inference cloud he originally envisioned.

The round was led by Disruptive, the Austin-based firm founded by Alex Davis — whose prior bets include Airbnb, Databricks, Palantir, Spotify, Stripe, Slack, and Shield AI — alongside Infinitum, led by founder and chief investment officer John Yetimoglu. Existing investors also reinvested.