Ubitium raises $14 million for universal physical AI processor

Ubitium GmbH announced it received $14 million in additional seed funding on Thursday. Ibex Investors led the round, while OpenOcean joined alongside existing backers like KBC Focus Fund and Runa Capital. Florian Seibel from Quantum Systems also participated personally in this investment.

The company was founded in 2024 and has now raised $18 million in total seed investment since then. Ubitium is a German semiconductor startup building processors for machines that perceive, think, and act in the real world. This category of technology is often called physical AI.

Autonomous systems like drones and robots need to process sensor data and control movements simultaneously. Today, developers usually split this work across separate specialized chips for sensing, computing, and control. This separation creates extra data transfer time and engineering complexity.

Ubitium developed a single universal processor to replace those specialized chips. The design uses RISC-V technology, which is a free open-source architecture without royalty fees. It combines signal processing, artificial intelligence inference, and real-time control on one silicon die.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Hyun Shin Cho stated that sensing the world is just as hard as making decisions for machines. The first chip model named UB108 proved this works in silicon with 256 processing elements manufactured on Samsung Electronics eighth-nanometer process. This prototype demonstrated all three processes working together effectively.

The company plans to launch a commercial processor called the UB410 with 4,096 processing elements. Initial delivery of evaluation units is scheduled for 2027. Market research suggests the global physical AI market could surpass $430 billion by 2030 and reach $1.6 trillion by 2040.