Ubitium Raises $14 Million for Universal Physical AI Processor

Ubitium GmbH announced Oct. 13 that it raised $14 million in seed funding to develop a processor that combines sensing, AI inference and real-time control for machines operating in the physical world.

Ibex Investors led the round. OpenOcean, KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital and Inflection also participated, while Florian Seibel, co-founder and co-CEO of Quantum Systems, invested personally. The financing brings Ubitium’s total seed funding to $18 million since the company was founded in 2024.

The Düsseldorf-based startup is targeting what it calls “Physical AI” applications in drones, robots, vehicles and industrial equipment. Its architecture combines signal processing, AI inference and real-time control through a reconfigurable RISC-V array and unified memory.

Ubitium’s first chip, the UB108, has 256 processing elements and was manufactured using Samsung’s 8-nanometer process. Ubitium says it demonstrated all three workloads on a single reconfigurable array. The company also says initial customers are developing radar and audio systems for sensing applications.

“Physical AI machines bring a whole new set of computing challenges, and the inference isn’t the hardest one,” Hyun Shin Cho, CEO and co-founder of Ubitium, said. “Sensing the real world and controlling the machine in it are just as hard, and today those still run on separate chips.”

Ubitium intends to complete the UB410 chip design, its first commercial processor, with 4,096 processing elements. The company plans to deliver evaluation units in 2027.

“An autonomous machine operating in the real world must keep working when communications are unavailable,” Seibel said. “It has to process its surroundings, make decisions and control itself on board, within strict limits on power and weight.”