We often hear that European startups lack access to scaleup funding. But sometimes the deals just come through thick and fast - like this week, in which we saw at least three big funding rounds in Europe, with SiPearl closing a €130 million (around US$150m) series A, Exein raising a €70 million (approx. US$ 82m) series C, and Q.Ant raising a €62 million (around US$72m) series A.
www.eetimes.com, Jul. 17, 2025 –
France based SiPearl, said it has taped out its first Rhea1 processor and closed its series A funding round to support the industrialization phase of the processor, and accelerate the research and development of the next generation of processors for supercomputing.
Rhea1, which SiPearl said is the most complex processor designed in Europe, is based on 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores and was taped out and handed off to TSMC in Taiwan for the start of manufacturing – and expected to be sampling in early 2026.
As reported in EE Times Europe, Rhea1 is claimed to work with any third-party accelerator, such as GPUs, AI-specialized chips, or quantum accelerators. SiPearl founder and CEO, Philippe Notton said, “It was designed in a non-selfish way so that it could work with virtually all GPUs on the market.” The next generation processors, Rhea2 and Rhea3 will be deployed consecutively in 2027 and 2028. “We spent a lot of time on the first chip,” according to Notton. “That was the time needed to get the team up to speed. The goal is to have much shorter cycles, i.e., 24 months, for the next chips.”
While supercomputing has been SiPearl’s historic market, starting with Rhea2, SiPearl will target not only the HPC market but also data centers. In that respect, Rhea2 and Rhea3 will use chiplet-based architectures. “Having a computing chiplet allows us to produce many more derivative chips simply by repackaging them, i.e., putting more or fewer of them in a package,” Notton said. “The challenge is being able to manage several elements in parallel or being able to integrate chips that may come from other hardware providers.”
Meanwhile, Italy-based Exein, an embedded IoT security company, raised a €70 million series C round which the company said will drive its global expansion plans across the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, as well as strengthen its established European presence.
In a January 2025 interview with EE Times, Gianni Cuozzo, founder and CEO at Exein, said the company, which he founded in 2018 after a history in various aspects of embedded cybersecurity and as a cyberweapon expert for various governments, spent four years proving its security solution before taking it to market, and at that time 80 million devices were protected using its technology.
Exein’s cybersecurity solution is a lightweight, efficient and adaptable piece of code that runs directly on the device software on embedded devices. This decentralized, endpoint approach helps secure individual devices independently at the edge. Additionally, using AI at the edge, it also enables real-time threat detection and response directly on the device.
In its funding announcement this week, Exein said that it is also developing runtime security solutions to secure AI infrastructure and large language models (LLMs), addressing the growing demand to secure AI and LLMs operating within devices, rather than in a centralized cloud environment. Additionally, it said the funding will support Exein’s pursuit of strategic M&A opportunities in the cybersecurity industry, further enhancing its growth plans.
Stuttgart, Germany based Q.Ant, founded in 2018 and focused on bringing photonic processors to market, has not only raised a €62 million series A but also attracted Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser to its advisory board. In its announcement, the company said the funding will This funding will enable Q.Ant to scale production, advance development of next-generation photonic processors, grow its team across disciplines, and expand to the U.S. to support a growing number of customer deployments.
Michael Förtsch, founder and CEO of Q.Ant, said, “Q.Ant was founded with a bold vision: to redefine the way the world computes by using light instead of electricity.” More technical details from the press announcement can be found here, The Dawn of Light-Speed Computing: Q.ant’s €62M Leap Toward a Photonic Future for AI and HPC, in sister publication embedded.com, and also here, Production of Q.ANT Photonic AI Accelerators Begins in Stuttgart.
One of the investors in the latest funding round was imec.xpand, the ventures arm of research institute imec. One of its partners, Cyril Vancura, explained, “Classical CMOS processors are approaching their physical and architectural limits – where further gains through parallelization and smaller structures yield only marginal improvements. In contrast, photonic computing represents a fundamentally new paradigm with immense, largely untapped scaling potential. Q.Ant has solved the core challenges of this technology and is well positioned to define the future of high[1]performance computing.”