San Sebastian-based Multiverse Computing — a scale-up focused on “sovereign and efficient AI” — announced a €500 million Series C funding round at a €1.5 billion pre-money valuation, a “5x step-up from its Series B.”
The round is co-led by Forgepoint Capital International, BNPP SIVF and Bullhound Capital.
Additional commitments to date have come from investors including Santander Alternative Investments, Tikehau Capital, HP Inc., Orange Ventures, Scania Invest, NAventures (National Bank of Canada’s corporate venture arm), Qatar Development Bank, Zouk Capital, SETT, EIC Fund, the Basque Government’s Hazten Scale-Up Fund (Gestión de Capital Riesgo de Euskadi – Grupo Spri), and Kutxa Fundazioa.
The round, advised by JP Morgan and Santander CIB, is expected to bring total funding to $800 million, inclusive of prior rounds, and may remain open to select additional strategic investors.
“The round is structured around two converging theses,” said Multiverse Computing.
“The first is AI on the edge: device manufacturers and infrastructure operators — who collectively reach hundreds of millions of end users and enterprises — believe that the next generation of AI has the potential to run directly on devices, not only through data centers, and that CompactifAI is the technology that can make it possible.
“The second is efficient and sovereign AI at scale: sovereign and infrastructure investors believe that the AI industry’s path forward runs through facilities that do twice the work on half the energy, and that Multiverse and CompactifAI models are the software stack uniquely positioned to power them.”
Enrique Lizaso, co-founder and CEO of Multiverse Computing, said: “The AI industry has accepted a false constraint for years — that powerful models require expensive infrastructure.
“That constraint is gone. We have proven that AI can run at full performance on a smartphone, inside a sovereign data center, on a factory floor with no cloud connection. This round is the moment we scale that proof across every industry that needs it.”
Multiverse Computing added: “At the heart of Multiverse’s platform is CompactifAI, a compression technology that applies tensor networks, a mathematical framework from quantum physics, to the problem of AI model compression.
“This application was pioneered by co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Román Orús and reduces the size of large language models by up to 80-95% with immaterial accuracy loss. The result is AI that runs faster, consumes less energy, and can be deployed in environments where sending data to a hyperscaler is too expensive, too slow, or not permitted.
“Multiverse’s platform spans the full deployment spectrum for efficient AI: compressed models optimized for cloud, on-premises, and on-device environments, orchestrated by the CompactifAI Router that decides in real time whether a workload should run locally or be sent to the cloud.
“The company is also applying an end-to-end software layer for next-generation AI factories and data centers that brings model compression, GPU orchestration, AI services, and sovereign-grade controls into a unified platform.
“For enterprises, this means that rather than having to route every workload through a hyperscaler and replacing existing infrastructure, Multiverse adds an efficiency layer above it that enables them to match each workload with the right model and backend — also saving hundreds of millions in the process.”
Damien Henault, Managing Director and Partner at Forgepoint Capital International, said: “The AI industry has built an extraordinary capability on top of an infrastructure model that wasn’t designed to sustain it.
“The winners in the next phase of this multi-trillion-dollar market will be the ones that make every data center, every GPU, and every enterprise deployment dramatically more efficient.
“Multiverse sits at the intersection of the infrastructure and the application layers and has evolved from being the leading downstream LLM compression technology to becoming a complete AI foundry and Operating System. It is the only company we’ve seen that has both the technical foundation and the commercial traction to be that critical platform.”
Yann Lagalaye, Managing Partner at BNPP Solar Impulse Venture Fund, said: “Beyond delivering substantial cost savings for its clients, Multiverse’s solutions achieve a structural reduction in the energy intensity of LLM workloads through advanced model‑compression techniques.
“This translates into lower GPU utilization, reduced energy consumption, and decreased infrastructure requirements, all while preserving comparable performance and accuracy levels. BNP Paribas SIVF is delighted to back Multiverse, whose transformative technology promises a significant step forward for the sustainable use of resources in AI model inference.”