Imec is spinning off memory chip company Vertical Compute in a $20.5 million deal

Europe Imec.xpand founded a memory chip company Vertical computing in a seed investment round valued at $20.5 million.

The company, founded by CEO Sylvain Dubois (ex-Google) and CTO Sebastien Couet (ex-imec), today announced that it has successfully completed a seed investment of $20.5 million or €20 million.

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 goal of developing novel vertically integrated storage and computing technology, enabling a new generation of AI applications.

Vertical Compute’s technology will have a transformative impact, enabling next-generation applications with unprecedented efficiency and privacy. By minimizing data movement and bringing large amounts of data closer to computation, the innovation delivers energy savings of up to 80%, unlocks hyper-personalized AI solutions and eliminates the need for remote data transfers, thereby protecting user privacy.

“Storage technologies are encountering limitations in both density and performance scaling as processor performance continues to increase. The extreme data access requirements of AI workloads exacerbate this challenge and make it imperative to overcome the storage wall to enable the next wave of AI innovation. “We believe that Vertical Compute is the path to 100x profits,” Vertical Compute CTO Sébastien Couet said in a statement.

Tackle the memory wall

Rapid advances in large language models and generative AI are transforming virtually every industry at an unprecedented pace. However, these large-scale AI models still rely heavily on complex cloud infrastructure and high-bandwidth storage, resulting in data transfer latency, high energy consumption, and the transmission of sensitive data to remote servers.

Edge computing can solve these problems, but inference of large AI models on smartphones, PCs or smart home devices has significant cost, performance and scalability limitations.

The big basic 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 energy intensive. Scaling of both storage technologies in terms of density and performance is slowing while processor speeds and market demands continue to increase, creating a significant bottleneck.

This problem is rapidly escalating due to the increasing demand for AI workloads that require rapid access to large amounts of data. Overcoming this memory wall is crucial to advancing AI inference.

Innovate with Vertical Compute’s chiplet technology

The convergence of large-scale AI models and edge computing requires a transformative change in the way data is processed. Vertical Compute will capitalize on this opportunity by developing chiplet-based solutions that take a modular approach to chip design and leverage a new way to store bits in a vertical, high aspect ratio structure. The concept behind Vertical Compute’s patented core technology was invented by Sebastien Couet, Imec’s former Magnetic Program Director. The core innovation lies in the integration of vertical data tracks on computing units. It has the potential to surpass DRAM in density, cost and energy by reducing data movements from centimeters to nanometers. This promising technology, coupled with an ambitious commercialization plan, has led to the creation of this new semiconductor company.

“The rise of data-intensive applications such as generative AI requires a dramatic new approach to data transfer between computing cores and storage devices. Our solution is designed to overcome the fundamental scaling limitations of storage technologies through vertical alignment. We are committed to unlocking the full potential of large language models at the edge without compromise,” said Sylvain Dubois, CEO of Vertical Compute, in a statement.

“We want to recruit the best from all over Europe and finally bring Europe to the forefront of technology,” said Dubois.

Driving recruitment and growth

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

This seed investment round underscores the confidence in the leadership team’s capabilities and the disruptive potential of this groundbreaking technology. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Sylvain, Sebastien and their team and help them achieve their ambitious goals,” Imec.xpand’s Tom Vanhoutte said in a statement.

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

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