UPMEM secures €7M funding to transform AI and analytics processing

UPMEM, a semiconductor startup, has secured €4.1 million in equity funding from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and various venture capitalists including Partech, Western Digital Capital, and C4 Ventures. In addition, they have received a €2.5 million grant from the EIC. The company, founded by Fabrice Devaux and Gilles Hamou, is at the forefront of developing ultra-efficient Processing In Memory (PIM) accelerators to address the challenge of compute efficiency in AI and big data applications.

UPMEM’s PIM solution, which includes their first commercial-grade PIM chip, is now available in cloud markets worldwide, including the US and Asia. This solution offers cost-effective and energy-efficient options for AI and analytics applications in data centers and at the edge. It is particularly beneficial for tasks such as large language models (LLM) like GPT, genomics, and large-scale analytics. By implementing PIM technology, energy consumption, cost, and hardware footprint can be reduced by up to 10 times while still improving performance. This has the potential to decrease data center electricity consumption by 20% and can be integrated into advanced devices such as PCs and smartphones.

Gilles Hamou, CEO and co-founder of UPMEM, expressed his enthusiasm for their PIM chips, stating that they are the ideal solution to overcome the energy and cost-intensive nature of handling AI workloads that heavily rely on off-chip data movement, like LLM/GPT.

Svetoslava Georgieva, Chair of the EIC Fund Board, praised UPMEM as an example of how the European Union supports top innovators in scaling their ventures. She highlighted that UPMEM’s disruptive approach to compute architecture demonstrates that European players are reclaiming strategic positions in semiconductor design for high-performance computing.

Overall, UPMEM’s innovative PIM technology has the potential to revolutionize the efficiency of AI and big data applications, offering significant benefits in terms of energy consumption, cost reduction, and performance improvement.

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