Funding Round attributes
Vertical Compute, a newly established company in the semiconductor industry, has successfully completed a $20.5 million (20 million euros) seed funding round as part of its spin-out from Europe’s Imec.xpand. The funding marks a pivotal step in the company's mission to revolutionize memory and compute technology. Investors in this round include Eurazeo, XAnge, Vector Gestion, and Imec, signaling strong confidence in Vertical Compute’s potential.
The company, headquartered in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, aims to address fundamental inefficiencies in memory systems that are critical to the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI). Traditional memory technologies, such as Static RAM (SRAM) and Dynamic RAM (DRAM), face challenges related to scalability, cost, and energy efficiency. As generative AI and large language models place increasing demands on data processing infrastructure, these limitations have become more apparent.
Vertical Compute is tackling these issues with an innovative approach to memory architecture. Its chiplet technology integrates vertical data lanes on computation units, reducing the need for extensive data movement. This design significantly improves energy efficiency, with potential reductions in energy consumption of up to 80%. The approach also enhances privacy by minimizing the need for remote data transfers, enabling hyper-personalized AI applications.
CTO Sébastien Couet elaborated on the company’s vision, stating, “The extreme data access requirements of AI workloads exacerbate this challenge, making it imperative to overcome the memory wall to enable the next wave of AI innovations. We believe going Vertical is the path to 100X gains.”
The company’s modular chip design leverages high-aspect-ratio vertical structures to achieve superior density, cost efficiency, and energy performance compared to traditional DRAM. This innovation is the result of years of research led by Couet during his tenure as Magnetic Program Director at Imec. Vertical Compute’s technology is designed to enable edge computing applications, making it possible to deploy large AI models locally without compromising performance or scalability.
Vertical Compute’s leadership team, including CEO Sylvain Dubois, has ambitious plans to establish Europe as a leader in technological innovation. The company is building R&D hubs in Leuven, Belgium; Grenoble, France; and Nice, France. Dubois emphasized the importance of talent acquisition, stating, “We want to recruit the very best from all over Europe and finally put Europe at the forefront in terms of tech.”
The seed funding reflects strong investor confidence in the company’s ability to address critical challenges in the semiconductor industry. Tom Vanhoutte of Imec.xpand highlighted the strategic importance of the investment, saying, “This seed investment round highlights the confidence in the leadership team’s capabilities and the disruptive potential of this game-changing technology.” Patrick Vandenameele, co-COO at Imec, added, “We are confident that, with the ongoing support of our teams and ecosystem, Vertical Compute can become a disruptor in the semiconductor industry.”
Founded in 2024, Vertical Compute is positioned to transform memory systems and enable the next generation of AI technologies. By addressing the scaling limitations of current memory architectures and improving energy efficiency, the company is poised to lead advancements in both AI and the broader semiconductor industry. With its initial funding and a clear vision for innovation, Vertical Compute embarks on a journey to redefine the role of memory in data processing and computation.
