French chipmaker SiPearl has raised a €130m Series A to kick-start the industrial production of its flagship product thanks to a partnership with leading Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC.
The startup secured the funding in three tranches since 2023, with a final extension of €32m co-led by the European Innovation Council (EIC) and Taiwanese VC Cathay Venture.
Fundraising for SiPearl’s Series B will start in just a few weeks, according to the company, with a target of €200m.
SiPearl launched in 2019 to build European central processing units (CPUs), a type of semiconductor currently largely developed by foreign tech giants like Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. The startup says it has now fully developed its first chip, dubbed Rhea1.
Rhea1, which contains 80 cores from chip designer Arm, is intended for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI inference — when live data is run through a pre-trained AI model to test how well it can make a prediction or solve a task.
Production of the chip is set to be carried out by TSMC, says SiPearl, with the first devices expected to be available at the start of 2026.
“Using European tools is indispensable to ensure the independence and sovereignty of Europe in the field of AI and in strategic sectors like security and defence,” said SiPearl CEO Philippe Notton in a press statement.
“As we begin production of the most complex microprocessor ever conceived in Europe, we show Europe now has a player able to compete with non-European leaders in the sector.”
Taping out Rhea1
Tape-out, which refers to the process of transferring semiconductor design to industrial manufacturing, is a difficult stage due to the significant costs involved. Notton tells Sifted in late 2024 SiPearl went through a moment of financial instability as the development of Rhea1 saw some delays.
“There were two months of delay [...] and given the costs of development we were slightly exposed,” says Notton.
Although there was still “cash in the bank”, says Notton, a procédure de conciliation (conciliation procedure) was opened with a French commercial court to present investors with a plan showing the company had sufficient runway.
The plan was agreed at the end of May. “We showed we could manage well and the third extension to the Series A was coming in, so we could show a very long runway,” says Notton.
SiPearl says Rhea1 will be used to equip Jupiter, a supercomputer currently hosted in Germany which is on track to become Europe’s first exascale computer — a device capable of carrying out billions of billions of calculations per second.
The chip will also be used in a number of other European computing projects like open-source cloud platform OpenCUBE.
In addition to funding the industrialisation of Rhea1, the fresh capital will be used to boost R&D activities to launch future generations of CPUs, with a focus on growing markets like data centres and AI for enterprises.
The French startup currently has a team of 200 people in France, Spain, and Italy.
