$14m · Seed · Hardware · Düsseldorf, Germany
Ubitium has raised $14m in new Seed funding to turn its reconfigurable processor architecture into a commercial chip for machines that sense, decide and act in the physical world. According to the company’s 13 October announcement, Ibex Investors led the round, with OpenOcean, existing backers KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital and Inflection, and Quantum Systems co-founder and co-CEO Florian Seibel investing personally. Ubitium says the financing brings its total seed funding to $18m since its founding in 2024.
The Düsseldorf company is trying to replace a stack of specialised processors with one programmable architecture. Its design combines signal processing, AI inference and real-time control on a coarse-grained reconfigurable array, while using a common memory system and standard RISC-V tools. The intended customer benefit is less data movement between chips, a simpler software toolchain and fewer integration decisions when building drones, robots, vehicles and industrial equipment.
From first silicon to a commercial chip
The financing follows Ubitium’s first silicon, rather than preceding it. The company says its UB108 engineering chip, manufactured on Samsung’s 8nm process with 256 processing elements, has run signal processing, AI inference and real-time control on the same array. That is an important technical milestone, but it is not yet a commercial product or an independent performance benchmark.
Ubitium now plans to tape out the UB410, a commercial processor with 4,096 processing elements, and deliver evaluation units in 2027. It says initial customers are working on high-resolution radar and audio systems, where demanding sensing workloads offer an earlier route into production than the full perceive-think-act loop. No customer names or order volumes were disclosed.
That sequencing defines the commercial test for the round. A reusable processor and toolchain could reduce integration work across several machine categories, but only if the larger chip can preserve performance, power efficiency and real-time behaviour as the architecture scales. Evaluation units will let prospective customers test those claims against specialised alternatives and decide whether simplifying the compute stack outweighs the advantages of dedicated processors.
The team’s experience is part of the underwriting case. Ubitium says co-founder and CTO Martin Vorbach has worked on reconfigurable computing for more than three decades, while the company holds 17 granted patents and its staff have backgrounds at Intel, Nvidia, Apple and Texas Instruments. Those are company-reported credentials; commercial adoption will still depend on translating the architecture into reliable silicon, software support and design wins.
Seibel’s personal participation also connects the technical proposition to a demanding potential use case. He argues that autonomous machines must process sensing, inference and control on board when communications are unavailable and power and weight are constrained. His investment does not establish a customer commitment, but it does sharpen the problem Ubitium must solve as the UB410 moves from roadmap to evaluation hardware.
