Insider Brief
- Ubitium has raised $14 million in new seed funding led by Ibex Investors to develop a universal processor designed to combine sensing, AI inference and real-time control for robots, drones and other autonomous machines.
- The financing brings Ubitium’s total seed funding to $18 million, with OpenOcean, KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital, Inflection and Quantum Systems co-founder Florian Seibel participating in the latest round.
- Ubitium said its UB108 prototype has already demonstrated signal processing, AI inference and control on one reconfigurable architecture, while its planned UB410 commercial chip with 4,096 processing elements is expected to reach evaluation customers in 2027.
Ubitium has raised $14 million in new seed funding to develop a processor designed to handle sensing, AI and real-time control on a single chip for robots, drones and other autonomous machines.
Ibex Investors led the round, with participation from OpenOcean and existing investors KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital and Inflection, according to the company. Florian Seibel, co-founder and co-CEO of European defense technology company Quantum Systems, also invested personally.
Ubitium previously raised $3.7 million in seed funding and the financing brings the Düsseldorf, Germany-based startup’s total seed funding to $18 million since it was founded in 2024 by CEO Hyun Shin Cho and CTO Martin Vorbach.
Ubitium is developing what it calls a universal processor for physical AI systems that must continuously process sensor information, run AI models and control physical movement in real time. Those functions are commonly divided among several types of processors, including digital signal processors for sensor data, neural processing units for AI and CPUs for control. Instead, Ubitium is working to combine those workloads on one reconfigurable processor architecture.
“Physical AI machines bring a whole new set of computing challenges, and the inference isn’t the hardest one,” Cho said in the announcement. “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 company said its design uses an array of programmable processing elements that can shift computing resources among signal processing, AI inference and real-time control as workloads change. It also uses unified memory and standard RISC-V development tools. Ubitium claims reducing the number of specialized processors could cut the amount of data being transferred between chips and simplify software development for manufacturers building autonomous systems.
The funding follows testing of the company’s first silicon, the UB108 prototype, that contains 256 processing elements and was manufactured using Samsung’s 8-nanometer process. Ubitium said the chip has demonstrated signal processing, AI inference and real-time control on the same reconfigurable array.
The company plans to use the new capital to turn that architecture into a commercial product. Its first commercial processor, the UB410, is planned with 4,096 processing elements. Ubitium expects to tape out the chip and provide evaluation units to customers in 2027.
Initial customers are working on sensing applications including high-resolution radar and audio systems, where signal processing and AI can run on the same processor, according to the company. Autonomous systems, including drones, are longer-term targets for applications that combine the complete sensing, decision-making and control loop.
The company indicated it holds 17 granted patents covering its core technology, with additional applications pending. Ubitium said its team has experience at companies including Intel, Nvidia, Apple and Texas Instruments.
