The world’s its oyster for SiPearl as Arm backs €90m Series A
Cambridge superchip architect Arm has invested in a stunning €90 million first close Series A round for French company SiPearl, which is building the energy-efficient HPC microprocessor for exascale2 supercomputers.
Backers also include the European Innovation Council of which Cambridge serial entrepreneur and Arm co-founder Dr Hermann Hauser is a board member.
And Cambridge – certainly the UK – may well be on the radar as a future location for SiPearl on this side of the Channel. CEO and founder Philippe Notton told Business Weekly this morning: “We will land in Cambridge or Bristol sooner or later.” The company is scaling from 130 staff to 1,000 by the end of 2025.
SiPearl is developing the high-performance, low-power microprocessor that will be the heart of European supercomputers essential to the Continent’s technological sovereignty in strategic areas such as artificial intelligence, medical research, climate change mitigation and energy management.
As Business Weekly previously reported, SiPearl has signed up to use the next-generation secure and scalable Arm Neoverse platform, codenamed Zeus, as well as the robust software and hardware Arm ecosystem.
Other investors in the latest round alongside Arm include Atos Group, through its Eviden business composed of Atos’ digital, big data and security activities; Dr Hauser’s European Innovation Council Fund, which previously injected €15m; the French State, via French Tech Souveraineté, which is part of France 2030 led by the General Secretariat for Investment (attached to the Prime-Minister’s Office) is another backer. Additional investors are expected to join the round by the end of the year.
This first funding milestone brings SiPearl’s total financing to €110.5m, including €20.5m worth of European Union and French grants provided through the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium project, the EIC Accelerator program and Ile-de-France region.
Using the Arm® Neoverse V1 platform, SiPearl’s Rhea will be the world’s first HPC-dedicated microprocessor designed to work with any third-party accelerator, such as GPUs, artificial intelligence specialised chips or quantum accelerators.
Formal cooperation agreements with GPU providers (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA) and artificial intelligence processor provider (Graphcore, which has Cambridge facilities) have already been announced. Energy-efficiency optimised, Rhea will halve power consumption for equivalent computing power.
While HPC has traditionally been used on premise for medical research, nuclear simulations or weather forecasts, it is now increasingly used in the cloud for artificial intelligence model training and other data intensive applications.
With global markets in its sights, Rhea will first equip European supercomputers to reach exascale power with back-door free security and reduced energy consumption.
SiPearl is at the heart of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking ecosystem, which is deploying world-class infrastructures for exascale supercomputing in Europe with a budget of over €8 billion. The company employs 130 people in France but is recruiting fast and is targeting more than 1,000 employees by the end of 2025.
Philippe Notton says: “Historically lagging behind the US and China, Europe has become a global leader in HPC thanks to the EuroHPC initiative, ranking for the first time two machines among the four most powerful supercomputers in the world, with LUMI in Finland and Leonardo in Italy.
“The arrival on the market of SiPearl’s microprocessor Rhea, which will power European supercomputers with a limited environmental footprint, will be another decisive step for Europe's technological independence and sovereignty.
“We would like to thank the European Union's innovation programmes, which have championed us all along the way, and the investors who have joined us in this first round of financing for contributing to our success.”
• PHOTOGRAPH: SiPearl CEO and founder Philippe Notton (third from left) with members of the management team
