Semiconductor startup Ubitium has raised $14 million in a new seed funding round to develop a universal processor for machines that can sense, think, and act in the real world. The round was led by Ibex Investors, with participation from OpenOcean and existing investors KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital, and Inflection. Florian Seibel, co-founder and co-CEO of European defence technology company Quantum Systems, also invested personally.
Founded in 2024, Ubitium has now raised a total of $18 million in seed funding. The company aims to simplify how machines process information by developing a single processor that can handle several computing tasks instead of relying on multiple specialised chips.
Ubitium believes autonomous machines need three main computing capabilities to operate effectively: processing information from their surroundings, using AI to make decisions, and controlling actions in real time. Today, these tasks are often handled by separate chips. Ubitium is developing a universal processor that can bring all three functions together in one system.
The latest funding follows the successful return of the company’s first silicon chip, which was designed and manufactured for testing. Ubitium reached this milestone about a year after its founding. The test demonstrated that its processor architecture could handle signal processing, AI tasks, and real-time control on a single chip.
“Physical AI machines bring a whole new set of computing challenges, and the inference isn’t the hardest one,” said Hyun Shin Cho, CEO and co-founder of Ubitium. “Sensing the real world and controlling the machine in it are just as hard, and today those still run on separate chips. We built one Physical AI processor that does all three, proved it in silicon in a year, and this funding turns it into a product.”
“The pace of AI is only increasing, far exceeding the ability of hardware to keep up and manage,” said Jeffrey Peters, Partner at Ibex Investors. “Ubitium solves this with a universal reconfigurable architecture that can deploy the latest advances on a single piece of silicon with a single set of development tools. Ubitium is truly hardware at the pace of software.”
“Since getting to know Hyun Shin and Martin in the beginning of 2024 and being the first check in, they’ve delivered astonishing results. Everything they bet on regarding the market of physical AI systems has come true, and they’re uniquely positioned to deliver compute and intelligence to a huge part of the market: from drones to humanoids. We’re thrilled to join new and existing investors in this round,” said Jonatan Luther-Bergquist, General Partner, Inflection.
Ubitium is developing a universal processor for Physical AI, which enables machines to understand their surroundings and respond to real-world situations. Today, machines often need several different chips to handle tasks such as sensing their environment, making decisions, and controlling actions.
Ubitium aims to replace these separate chips with a single processor that can perform all these tasks. Its technology uses a flexible RISC-V architecture that can be adapted through software to meet the needs of different machines, rather than relying on chips designed for only specific tasks.
The company developed and tested its first chip within a year of being founded, demonstrating that its technology could combine different computing tasks on one processor. Ubitium’s first customers are working on sensing technologies for radar and audio. The company’s long-term goal is to make AI and sensing capabilities a standard part of everyday machines, just as microprocessors have become essential to modern electronics.
