UPMEM, a fabless semiconductor startup has raised €4.1 M equity from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and Venture Capitalists (Partech, Western Digital Capital, C4 Ventures…), and a €2.5M grant from the EIC. Founded by Fabrice Devaux and Gilles Hamou, the company is pioneering ultra-efficient Processing In Memory (PIM) accelerators to tackle the significant challenge of compute efficiency for AI and big data applications.

UPMEM's PIM solution, integrating UPMEM's first commercial-grade PIM chip on the market, is now available to cloud markets across the globe (US, Asia...) to provide the most cost-effective and energy-efficient solutions for AI and analytics applications in data centers and at the edge, such as large language models (LLM e.g. GPT), genomics, large analytics.PIM can reduce energy consumption, cost, and hardware footprint by up to 10 times while still boosting performance. It has the potential to reduce data center electricity consumption by 20% and can be integrated into the most advanced devices such as PCs and smartphones.

Gilles Hamou, CEO & co-founder, commented: "UPMEM's pioneering PIM chips are the ideal solution to break away from the energy and cost-intensive hardware race to handle AI workloads that are dominated by off-chip data movement, such as LLM/GPT".

Svetoslava Georgieva, Chair of the EIC Fund Board, said: "The EIC Fund aims at backing European innovators in scaling their journey and UPMEM is a great example of how the European Union is helping top innovators. They are disrupting current compute architecture and proving that European players are regaining strategic positions in semiconductor design for high-performance computing."