SiPearl, a company developing European high-performance, energy-efficient processors for supercomputing and AI, has secured the final closing of its €130 million Series A funding with a third tranche of €32 million.
Initially funded by the European Union, SiPearl was launched in January 2020 under the auspices of the European Processor Initiative consortium, which aims to promote the return of high-performance, energy-efficient processor technologies to Europe. And since then, the company has achieved its mission by assembling a world-class processor team of 200 employees across France, Spain, and Italy, and by establishing its own sovereign infrastructure with data centers in France equipped with servers and emulators dedicated to semiconductor design.
SiPearl has completed the design of Rhea1, which is one the most complex processors ever created in Europe. Featuring 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores and comprising over 61 billion transistors, Rhea1 was recently taped out and handed over to TSMC in Taiwan, a leading foundry, for manufacturing.
Rhea1 will be powering the CPU cluster of JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer owned by EuroHPC JU and operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. And as a key component of notable European collaborative projects, Rhea1 will help ensure Europe’s technological sovereignty, independence, and competitiveness.
SiPearl’s total Series A funding is the largest in the European fabless semiconductor industry, and its third tranche was supported by two existing investors: EIC Fund and the French government via French Tech Souveraineté, part of France 2030 led by the General Secretariat for Investment, as well as a new investor, the Taiwanese private equity firm Cathay Venture.
This latest Series A round will fund the industrialization of Rhea1 and advance R&D activities for the development of next-generation processors designed to meet the demands of supercomputing and emerging markets such as data centers, AI, and enterprise applications, ahead of the upcoming Series B launch.
