Imec spins off memory chip company Vertical Compute in $20.5M deal

Europe Imec.xpand spins out a memory chip company Vertical computer in a $20.5 million seed investment round.

Founded by CEO Sylvain Dubois (ex-Google) and CTO Sebastien Couet (ex-imec), announced today that they successfully closed a seed investment of $ 20.5 million, or 20 million euros.

The round was led by Imec.xpand and supported by a strong investor base including Eurazeo, XAnge, Vector Gestion and imec. The funding will support Vertical Compute's ambition to develop new vertical memory and computing technology, unlocking a new generation of AI applications.

Vertical Compute technology will have a transformative impact, enabling next-generation applications with unparalleled efficiency and privacy. By reducing data transfer and bringing big data closer to computation, the innovation ensures energy savings of up to 80%, unlocks hyper-personalized AI solutions, and eliminates the need for remote data transfer, protecting user privacy.

“Memory technologies face limitations in both density and performance scale, while processor performance continues to increase. The extreme data access requirements of AI workloads exacerbate this challenge, making it critical to overcome the memory wall to enable the next wave of AI innovations. We believe that going Vertical is the path to 100X benefits”, said Sébastien Couet, CTO of Vertical Compute, in a statement.

Dealing with the Memory Wall

The rapid advances in big language models and generative AI are changing almost every industry at an unprecedented pace. However, these large-scale AI models still rely heavily on complex cloud infrastructure and high-bandwidth memories, resulting in data transfer latency, high energy consumption and sending sensitive data to remote servers. from

Edge computing can address these issues, but deploying large AI modules on smartphones, PCs or smart home devices has significant cost, power and scalability limitations.

The big underlying 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 main memory of computer systems, is larger but expensive and consumes energy. The scaling of both memory technologies in density and performance is slowing down while processor speed and market needs continue to increase, causing a major bottleneck.

This problem continues to increase due to the growing demand for AI workloads, requiring access to large amounts of data quickly. Overcoming this memory wall is critical to advancing AI decision making.

Innovation with Chiplet Vertical Compute Technology

The convergence of large-scale AI models and edge computing calls for a transformative shift in the way data is processed. Vertical Compute will seize this opportunity by developing chiplet-based solutions – which take a modular approach to chip design – using a new way to store bits in a high aspect ratio vertical structure. The concept behind Vertical Compute's patented core technology was created by Sebastien Couet, former Magnetic Program Director at Imec. The main innovation is in the integration of direct data paths as well as computing units. It has the potential to outperform DRAM in terms of density, cost and energy, by reducing data transfers from centimeters to nanometers. This promising technology, combined with an ambitious commercial plan, has led to the creation of this new semiconductor enterprise.

“The rise of data-intensive applications such as generative AI requires a radically new approach to moving data between computing cores and memory units. Our solution is designed to overcome the inherent scaling limitations of in-memory technologies by going direct. We are committed to unlocking the full potential of large language models without compromise,” said Sylvain Dubois, CEO of Vertical Compute, in a statement.

“We want to hire the best from all over Europe, and ultimately put Europe at the forefront of technology”, said Dubois.

Driving recruitment and growth

Vertical Compute is headquartered in Louvain-La-Neuve (BE), with its R&D headquarters in Leuven (BE), Grenoble (FR) and Nice (FR). The company is recruiting an elite team of engineers to support its ambitious R&D goals and to accelerate the development and commercialization of its chiplet-based technology.

This seed investment round demonstrates the confidence in the capabilities of the management team and the disruptive potential of this game-changing technology. We couldn't be more excited to collaborate with Sylvain, Sebastien and their team and help them achieve their ambitious goals”, said Tom Vanhoutte of Imec.xpand, in report

“We are confident that with the continued support of our teams and ecosystem, Vertical Compute can be disruptive in the semiconductor industry. The strong base of international investors shows that we are not alone in this belief,” Patrick Vandenameele, co-COO of Imec, said in a statement.

Vertical Compute was founded in 2024 to solve the memory bottleneck in computer systems.