MAISONS-LAFFITTE, FRANCE -- SiPearl, the company building European high-performance energy-efficient processors for supercomputing and AI has achieved the definitive closing of its €130m Series A with a third tranche of €32m.

Seed funded by the European Union, SiPearl was launched in January 2020 under the auspices of the European Processor Initiative consortium which aims to foster the return of high-performance energy-efficient processor technologies in Europe. Since then, the company has fulfilled its mission by building a world-class processor team of 200 employees in France, Spain, and Italy, set up its own sovereign infrastructure with data centres in France equipped with servers and emulators dedicated to semiconductor design. SiPearl has completed the conception of the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, Rhea1. With 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, Rhea1 is composed of more than 61bn transistors. Several weeks ago, Rhea1 taped-out and was handed off to the world’s leading foundry, TSMC in Taïwan, for start of manufacturing.

Rhea1 will equip the CPU cluster of JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer which is owned by EuroHPC JU and operated by Jülich Supercomputing Centre (Germany). Key component of iconic European collaborative projects, Rhea1 will help ensure Europe’s technological sovereignty, independence, and competitiveness.

SiPearl’s total Series A rounds is the largest Series A in the European fabless semiconductor industry. Its third tranche of funding is backed by 2 existing investors, EIC Fund and The French State, via French Tech Souveraineté which is part of France 2030 led by the General Secretariat for Investment, and a new investor, a major private equity firm, the Taiwanese Cathay Venture for its first investment in France.

This latest Series A funding round supports the industrialization phase of Rhea1. It also accelerates R&D activities for the launch of next-generation processors that will meet the needs of supercomputing and new market segments, such as data centres, AI, and enterprises, ahead of the launch of Series B in a few weeks.