Taiwan Billionaire Tsai's Cathay Venture Joins $152 Million Round In French AI Chip Startup SiPearl
Cathay Venture, the venture capital arm of Taiwan billionaire Tsai Hong-tu's banking giant Cathay Financial Holdings, has participated in French AI chip startup SiPearl's €130 million ($152 million) funding round.
SiPearl's Series A round marks Cathay Venture's first investment in the European AI hub of France, the startup said in a statement on Tuesday. It's also the largest Series A round in Europe's fabless semiconductor industry, according to SiPearl. Other investors who joined the round include SoftBank-owned chip designer Arm, the European Union's European Innovation Council Fund, state-owned fund French Tech Souveraineté and French IT company Atos.
Founded in 2019, SiPearl said it will use the funds to produce its AI chip, called Rhea1. The Rhea1 chip, which SiPearl claims is 'the most complex processor ever designed in Europe,' is an Arm-based central processing unit (CPU) designed for supercomputers and inference.
SiPearl said its Rhea1 chip has been handed off to TSMC for manufacturing and will be available for sampling early next year. The chip will be deployed at the government-funded Jupiter supercomputer in Germany for applications such as engineering, materials science and dark matter research.
'With the tape-out of the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, we are showing that Europe now has a competitor capable of challenging non-European leaders,' said SiPearl founder and CEO Philippe Notton, an engineer with stints at French-Italian chip maker STMicroelectronics and Taiwan's MStar Semiconductor (which was acquired by MediaTek in 2013).
Notton added in the statement that his startup chose to forge ties with Taiwan because 'Europe needs strong and independent partners in the global semiconductor ecosystem' and Taiwan is 'at the forefront of this industry worldwide.'
In the statement, Stanley Yu, assistant vice president at Cathay Venture, said the firm invested in SiPearl because it's 'one of the few semiconductor design companies in the world that, from its inception, set out to address the computing power and energy efficiency challenges faced by modern datacenters' needs.'
Cathay Venture was established in 2003 as the investment arm of Cathay Financial, Taiwan's largest financial group with more than $400 billion in total assets. The venture capital firm has more than one-fourth of its portfolio in semiconductor and electronics companies, according to the statement. Among them is U.S.-based Rivos, cofounded by Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, which develops chips based on the RISC-V architecture, an open-source alternative to the architecture made by Arm.
Cathay Venture's other portfolio companies include Taipei-based travel superapp KKDay, as well as Hong Kong-based virtual insurance startup OneDegree, which was featured on the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list in 2022. MORE FROM FORBES Forbes Meet The Hong Kong Billionaire-Backed Chinese Startup That's Making Chips Without U.S. Technology By Zinnia Lee Forbes Nvidia Joins $4 Million Seed Round In Taiwan's AI-Powered Simulation Startup MetAI By Zinnia Lee Forbes Taiwan's Travel Superapp KKday Receives $70 Million Investment To Fund Asia Expansion By Zinnia Lee
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