(Editor’s note: This post on Euclyd is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and founders.)
One of Europe’s most promising AI infrastructure plays is announcing a major capital raise, with Korean electronics giant Samsung a co-lead investor. The two-year old Eindhoven-based startup Euclyd raised a 200 euro million-plus Series A financing round. That’s twice what the company announced in April that it hoped to raise.
Euclyd has developed an AI inference accelerator card, a specialized hardware component for data centers designed to speed up AI tasks. Their package uses less energy while outperforming the competition. Fresh capital will expand Euclyd’s engineering staff, accelerate its silicon and systems roadmap, strengthen ecosystem partnerships and “prepare the company for commercial deployment across enterprise, sovereign, and hyperscale AI markets,” according to a news release.
Based in HTC 84 at High Tech Campus Eindhoven, Euclyd is a moon-shot project, building everything from scratch without using ARM or other architecture.
Euclyd has developed craftwerk, the world’s first agentic AI silicon, and craftwerk station CWS, the world’s lowest power exascale “AI factory,” according to the release. The platform combines programmable application-specific integrated circuit compute, processor-memory co-design, and system-level optimization to overcome the memory and efficiency walls limiting AI performance and scalability. Deep breath.
In our conversations with CEO and co-founder Bernard Kastrup, he emphasized the Eurocentric nature of the startup as well as global ambitions, with more AI idealism than you typically hear from techies. He foresees a world in which advanced AI is no longer constrained by infrastructure costs, power availability or geography. But Kastrup is also realistic about the limitations here compared to Silicon Valley.
Now the question is, will Euclyd stay in Eindhoven?
The round was co-led by Samsung Electronics, Somerset Capital Partners, Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT Ventures & Growth), and Innovation Industries, with participation from EIFO (the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark), imec.xpand, the Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij (BOM), and Quadri.
Along with the raise, the startup announced that Peter Wennink, the retired ASML CEO who turned the company into the most valuable tech company in Europe, is now chairman of the Euclyd board of directors.
Wennink is part of an all-star team that includes:
• Federico Faggin, who has a CV that includes time at Fairchild Semiconductor, which transformed Silicon Valley into Silicon Valley.
• Wennink is the former CEO of ASML. During Wennink’s leadership, ASML went from a struggling Philips spinoff to the deepest of deep-tech companies … a global giant with a virtual monopoly on the technology that lets chipmakers such as TSMC make advanced chips.
• Kastrup, from Brazil via Denmark, is Wennink’s former director of Product Strategy at ASML.
• Dutch entrepreneur Steven Schuurman founded Elastic, a data search and analytics company that launched on the public equity markets in 2018. Schuurman also founded Atlantis Entertainment with Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt. So, this is a Renaissance Man. One worth an estimated $1.5 billion.
Euclyd joins a growing cluster of outstanding startups and scale-ups on HTCE including:
• Axelera AI, which has raised more than $450 million as it builds products for AI at the edge.
• XIVER is the only independent MEMS (micro-electric mechanical systems) foundry in Europe. Like ASML and NXP, they’re a spinout from Philips.
• Avendar bills itself as the “Intelligence Platform for the Europe of Tomorrow.” Their mission is “to make Europe safer” with a trustworthy and transparent AI platform that strengthens high-stakes decision-making. By unifying complex data and insights, they help organizations act faster, identify risks earlier and make decisions with greater confidence, according to their website. So, think of Avendar as Palantir with a moral compass and without all the creepy billionaires.
• Nearfield is based in Rotterdam, but the Netherland’s newest Unicorn has operations on Campus. It has raised $380 million on a valuation of $1.6 billion.
• NXP’s global headquarters is on HTCE, and ASML has operations there.
So maybe it’s time to say it out loud … Eindhoven, specifically High Tech Campus, is the No. 1 semiconductor hub in Europe.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
