Chips are back into fashion in a big way, with the tiny bits of silicon powering everything from cars and washing machines to smartphones and laptops benefitting big time from the AI boom.
US tech giant Nvidia is the poster child. Demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs), used for the training and inference of large language models (LLMs), helped take its market cap north of $3tn last year.
Governments are getting in on the act too. At France’s AI Action Summit last week there were several announcements aimed at bolstering Europe’s compute power — which requires building more data centres and buying up heaps of chips to power them.
The European Commission launched a €200bn initiative, which includes funding four AI gigafactories stacked with 100k AI chips; French president Emmanuel Macron announced a €109bn package focused on investing in AI infrastructure over the next five years.
With demand at an all-time high, founders have sniffed an opportunity. Companies in Europe which have raised recently include Belgium’s Vertical Compute, which is developing new architecture for chips that power AI models, and Germany’s Gemesys, which is designing chips that ‘mimic the brain’ and allow AI models to be trained and run directly on devices.
Some startups, such as Oriole Networks in the UK, are trying to use photonics — the application of light — to train AI models faster and reduce the amount of energy they consume.
But where’s the money coming from? Based on Sifted data covering announced deals in 2024, it’s the investors below.
The most active semiconductor and photonics investors in Europe
European Innovation Council
HQ: Brussels
Deal count: 5
Deals led: 2
Deals include:
- Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Axelera, which is building AI hardware for GenAI and computer vision inference.
- Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium-based E-peas, a fabless semiconductor company.
Bpifrance
HQ: Paris
Deal count: 4
Deals include:
- Trets, France-based Eyco, which manufactures ‘smart circuits’ for the microelectronics industry.
- Paris-based Scalinx, a fabless semiconductor company.
Invest-NL
HQ: Amsterdam
Deal count: 4
Deals led: 1
Deals include:
- Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Effect Photonics, which develops integrated optical chips.
- Rotterdam, Netherlands-based Nearfield Instruments, which develops electron microscopes for 3D metrology.
High-Tech Gründerfonds
HQ: Bonn, Germany
Deal count: 4
Deals led: 1
Deals include:
- Bonn, Germany-based Midel Photonics, which manufactures laser beam shapers and splitters.
- Zurich, Switzerland-based Synthara, which is making embedded chips more capable for AI-powered applications.
Matterwave Ventures
HQ: Munich, Germany
Deal count: 4
Deals led: 2
Deals include:
- Rijswijk, Netherlands-based Innatera, which develops microprocessors that mimic the behaviour of the brain.
- Effect Photonics
Vsquared Ventures
HQ: Munich, Germany
Deal count: 4
Deals led: 2
Deals include:
- Aachen, Germany-based Black Semiconductor, which develops microchips with graphene to connect chips and speed up data processing
- Berlin-based Quantune Technologies, which has developed a miniaturised laser spectrometer for non-invasive health monitoring
Innovation Industries
HQ: Amsterdam
Deal count: 3
Deals led: 1
Deals include:
- Axelera
- Nearfield Instruments
Onsight Ventures
HQ: Innsbruck, Austria
Deal count: 3
Deals include:
- Synthara
- Black Semiconductor
