Groq: the Fastest Deal in our Portfolio

In August 2024, Raison invested in Groq, a US developer of specialized chips for artificial intelligence. Over two years, this investment became one of the most successful in the portfolio: through a series of corporate distributions, investors received around $58 net per share at an entry price of ≈ $25. The return came to 2.3x on invested capital.

We explain what the company does, why we saw potential in it, and how we arrived at this result.

What Groq does

Most modern artificial intelligence models run on graphics processing units (GPUs). But these chips were designed primarily for training neural networks, whereas inference, the everyday work of a model in generating responses, has entirely different requirements.

During inference, the main constraint is no longer computation but the speed of access to data. To generate each next word, the model has to reach for its parameters over and over. A significant share of the time and energy goes precisely to moving data between memory and the compute units.

Groq built an architecture optimized for exactly this task:

• The company minimized calls to external memory: the necessary data sits in the chips' internal memory, which significantly reduces latency and power consumption.
• Groq did away with dynamic scheduling of computation. Where traditional processors decide how to carry out operations in real time, in Groq's architecture the sequence of operations is fixed in advance, at the compilation stage. This delivers predictable performance and avoids idle compute units.
• A simpler architecture makes producing these chips less dependent on the most advanced manufacturing processes, which lowers their cost compared with flagship GPUs.

This approach has its limits too. The amount of on-chip memory stays relatively small, so running large language models requires combining a large number of chips into a single system.

Even so, it is precisely this approach that lets Groq achieve high response-generation speed and substantially improve energy efficiency compared with traditional solutions.

Why we made a bet on Groq

At the time of the investment, we saw several factors at once that made the company attractive:

Solving one of the market's key problems

Groq was building an architecture that speeds up inference, the execution of queries to AI models. As the use of generative artificial intelligence grows, the efficiency of processing user queries is becoming one of the main drivers of the industry's development.

A strong engineering team

Building your own processor architecture demands rare expertise held by only a few players on the market. Such technological solutions are hard to replicate, which means the company gains a durable competitive advantage.

Backing from leading investors

Groq's shareholders include BlackRock, Tiger Global, Samsung, Cisco, and other of the world's largest investors and technology companies. Their participation further confirmed the business's investment potential.

The result of the investment

In December 2025, NVIDIA entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq for the use of its inference technology. Following the deal, Groq directed part of the proceeds to distributions to its co-owners.
Our investors, who held their stake in the company through an SPV, received their share of these distributions.

The result: 2.3x on invested capital. Each share brought in ≈$58 net at an entry price of about $25. The holdings stayed in investors' portfolios: they earned a return while continuing to own the asset.

For Raison, this is one of the most successful realized deals of recent years.

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In this text, by “shares” we mean private shares — units of ownership in a private company that has not yet gone public.