Spectral Compute, the developer of SCALE, announced that it has raised $6 million in seed funding. Costanoa led the round with participation from Crucible and several angel investors. The company plans to use the new capital to accelerate market expansion and advance product development as it continues to introduce greater hardware flexibility across high-performance computing and artificial intelligence environments.
The high-performance computing and AI sectors have long relied on Nvidia’s CUDA framework, resulting in hardware dependency and limited choice for organizations that require flexibility in performance and supply chain resilience. Increasing component lead times and new export restrictions have intensified pressures on companies that depend on a single-vendor GPU supply.
Spectral’s SCALE software platform allows CUDA-based applications to run natively on multiple GPU architectures, beginning with AMD. This approach enables organizations to maintain a single codebase while diversifying hardware options. The technology allows customers to select future hardware based on performance and availability, thereby reducing operational risk and procurement constraints.
SCALE does not rely on traditional code translation or porting, which has historically required long implementation timelines and often resulted in reduced performance. Several early customers in sectors such as microprocessor design and high-performance motorsports are already using SCALE to run workloads across varied hardware environments.
Spectral was founded in 2018 by engineers Michael Søndergaard, Chris Kitching, Nicholas Tomlinson, and Francois Souchay. The team brings decades of experience in GPU programming, compiler innovation, and performance optimization across industries, including computational fluid dynamics, high-frequency trading, scientific research, and digital broadcasting. The company currently employs 19 full-time staff and plans to expand its engineering organization as adoption increases.
KEY QUOTES:
“Companies shouldn’t have to bet their entire compute infrastructure on one chipmaker. The vision of SCALE is that teams can finally use their existing CUDA code on any GPU, whether that’s Nvidia, AMD, Intel, or others, without performance loss or costly rewrites. We’re giving developers and enterprises the freedom they’ve never had before.”
Michael Søndergaard, Co-Founder and CEO, Spectral Compute
“Spectral has solved one of computing’s toughest challenges: letting teams write CUDA once but run it anywhere. Their breakthrough technology eliminates one of the largest bottlenecks in AI infrastructure and HPC today, unlocking choice and innovation across the compute landscape.”
Tony Liu, Partner, Costanoa
