SiPearl, the company building the energy-efficient HPC microprocessor supercomputers, announced the launch of its Series A with a first round of €90 million.
Maisons-Laffitte, France-based SiPearl raised €110.5 million to date.
The investors are: Arm, Atos Group, European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, and The French State, via French Tech Souverainete,. The financing includes up to €25 million in convertible debt from the European Investment Bank (EIB).
Additional investors are expected to join the round by the end of the year.
SiPearl is using the Arm Neoverse V1 platform to launch Rhea, a HPC-dedicated microprocessor that will work with any third-party accelerator, such as GPUs, artificial intelligence specialized chips or quantum accelerators. The company claims that Rhea will halve power consumption for equivalent computing power.
SiPearl announced agreements with GPU providers (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA) and artificial intelligence processor provider (Graphcore).
As part of the Horizon 2020 program, SiPearl is at the heart of EuroHPC Joint Undertaking ecosystem, which is deploying infrastructures for exascale supercomputing in Europe with a budget of over €8 billion.
SiPearl outsources the manufacturing of Rhea to TSMC, the leading semiconductor manufacturer, for a commercialization in early 2024. The company employs 130 people in France (Maisons-Laffitte, its headquarters, Grenoble, Massy, Sophia Antipolis), Germany (Duisburg) and Spain (Barcelona). SiPearl targets over 1,000 employees by the end of 2025.
