Ubitium Raises $14 Million Seed Round to Build Universal Processor for Physical AI

Ubitium, the semiconductor startup building a universal processor for machines that perceive, think and act in the real world, has announced $14 million in new seed funding. The round was led by Ibex Investors, with participation from OpenOcean, existing investors including KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital and Inflection, and Florian Seibel, co-founder and co-CEO of European defence technology company Quantum Systems, investing personally. It brings Ubitium's total seed funding to $18 million since the company was founded in 2024.

Ubitium's thesis is that autonomous machines need three kinds of computing to work together so they can perceive, think and act in the real world. The company is building one universal processor to replace the stack of specialised chips often stitched together to do that work today. The funding follows the return of Ubitium's first silicon, taped out a year after the company was founded, which demonstrated that signal processing, AI inference and real-time control can all run on one processor architecture.

Today developers divide that work across a digital signal processor for sensing, a neural processing unit for AI and a CPU for control. Connecting them adds data transfers, coordination and engineering complexity. Unlike processors built from separate specialised logic, Ubitium has reimagined the processor as one array of programmable elements for signal processing, AI and real-time control. Resources are allocated at runtime across those tasks, so the same silicon adapts to the machine's changing workload.

Hyun Shin Cho, CEO and co-founder of Ubitium, stated:

"Physical AI machines bring a whole new set of computing challenges, and the inference isn't the hardest one. 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."

Ubitium's first chip, the UB108 with 256 processing elements, manufactured on Samsung's 8nm process, has demonstrated signal processing, AI inference and real-time control running on the same reconfigurable array. The company plans to tape out its first commercial processor, the UB410 with 4,096 processing elements, and deliver evaluation units in 2027. Initial customers are building Physical AI's sensing layer, including high-resolution radar and audio systems.

Florian Seibel, co-founder and co-CEO of Quantum Systems, stated:

"An autonomous machine operating in the real world must keep working when communications are unavailable. It has to process its surroundings, make decisions and control itself on board, within strict limits on power and weight. Today that means integrating a stack of chips that were not designed to work together, and every one of them costs weight, power and integration time we don't have. Ubitium is building the one processor that does that whole job. That's why I invested."

Jeffrey Peters, Partner at Ibex Investors, stated:

"The pace of AI is only increasing, far exceeding the ability of hardware to keep up and manage. 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."

Founded in 2024 by Hyun Shin Cho and Martin Vorbach, a reconfigurable computing pioneer, Ubitium is headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. The company holds 17 granted patents covering its core technology, with more pending.