The European company Imec.xpand is founding a memory chip company Vertical computing in a seed investment round valued at $20.5 million.
The company, founded by CEO Sylvain Dubois (ex-Google) and CTO Sebastien Couet (ex-imec), today announced that it has successfully accomplished a seed investment of $20.5 million or €20 million.
The round was led by Imec.xpand and supported by a robust investor base including Eurazeo, XAnge, Vector Gestion and imec. The funding will support Vertical Compute's goal of developing novel vertically integrated storage and computing technology, enabling a brand new generation of AI applications.
Vertical Compute's technology could have a transformative impact, enabling next-generation applications with unprecedented efficiency and privacy. By minimizing data movement and bringing large amounts of information closer to computation, the innovation delivers energy savings of as much as 80%, unlocks hyper-personalized AI solutions and eliminates the necessity for distant data transfers, thereby protecting user privacy.
“Storage technologies are encountering limitations in each density and performance scaling as processor performance continues to extend. The extreme data access requirements of AI workloads exacerbate this challenge and make it imperative to beat the storage wall to enable the following wave of AI innovation. “We consider that Vertical Compute is the trail to 100x profits,” Vertical Compute CTO Sébastien Couet said in an announcement.
Tackle the memory wall
Rapid advances in large language models and generative AI are transforming virtually every industry at an unprecedented pace. However, these large-scale AI models still rely heavily on complex cloud infrastructure and high-bandwidth storage, leading to data transfer latency, high energy consumption, and the transmission of sensitive data to distant servers.
Edge computing can solve these problems, but inference of enormous AI models on smartphones, PCs or smart home devices has significant cost, performance and scalability limitations.
The big basic problem is the “memory wall”. Static random access memory (SRAM), integrated as caches of the CPU or GPU, is fast but very small and expensive. Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM), the important memory of computer systems, is larger but expensive and energy intensive. Scaling of each storage technologies by way of density and performance is slowing while processor speeds and market demands proceed to extend, creating a big bottleneck.
This problem is rapidly escalating as a consequence of the increasing demand for AI workloads that require rapid access to large amounts of information. Overcoming this memory wall is crucial to advancing AI inference.
Innovate with Vertical Compute's chiplet technology
The convergence of large-scale AI models and edge computing requires a transformative change in the best way data is processed. Vertical Compute will capitalize on this chance by developing chiplet-based solutions that take a modular approach to chip design and leverage a brand new technique to store bits in a vertical, high aspect ratio structure. The concept behind Vertical Compute's patented core technology was invented by Sebastien Couet, Imec's former Magnetic Program Director. The core innovation lies in the mixing of vertical data tracks on computing units. It has the potential to surpass DRAM in density, cost and energy by reducing data movements from centimeters to nanometers. This promising technology, coupled with an ambitious commercialization plan, has led to the creation of this recent semiconductor company.
“The rise of data-intensive applications equivalent to generative AI requires a dramatic recent approach to data transfer between computing cores and storage devices. Our solution is designed to beat the elemental scaling limitations of storage technologies through vertical alignment. We are committed to unlocking the complete potential of enormous language models at the sting without compromise,” said Sylvain Dubois, CEO of Vertical Compute, in an announcement.
“We wish to recruit the very best from throughout Europe and eventually bring Europe to the forefront of technology,” said Dubois.
Driving recruitment and growth
Vertical Compute has its headquarters in Louvain-La-Neuve (BE) and important research and development offices in Leuven (BE), Grenoble (FR) and Nice (FR). The company is recruiting an elite team of engineers to support its ambitious research and development goals and speed up the event and commercialization of its chiplet-based technology.
This seed investment round underscores the arrogance within the leadership team's capabilities and the disruptive potential of this groundbreaking technology. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Sylvain, Sebastien and their team and help them achieve their ambitious goals,” Imec.xpand’s Tom Vanhoutte said in an announcement.
“We are confident that with the continued support of our teams and ecosystem, Vertical Compute can change into a disruptor within the semiconductor industry. The strong international investor base shows that we will not be alone on this belief,” Patrick Vandenameele, co-COO at Imec, said in an announcement.
Vertical Compute was founded in 2024 to resolve the memory bottleneck in computer systems.
