Why Ubitium Thinks Its Chip Design Will Unlock The Future

If Ubitium’s chips are not driving the performance of millions of systems and devices within five years or so, CEO Hyun Shin Cho will be a disappointed man. Cho, who founded Ubitium, jointly with CTO Martin Vorbach and chairman Peter Weber, claims a new “universal processor” developed by the start-up has the potential to revolutionise multiple industries.

“We’re solving the cost and complexity problem that almost every company is now facing,” says Cho of the company, which is headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany. “We envision a future where every device operates autonomously, making intelligent decisions in real time and transforming the way we interact with technology.”

Ubitium, which is today announcing that it has raised $3.7 million of seed funding, argues that the roll-out of the next generation of new technologies has stalled. “We were promised a world of smart cities and autonomous vehicles, but it has largely not materialised,” says Cho. “The problem people have run into is one of deployment; the processors we’ve been building since the 1960s aren’t able to cope with the scale and pace we now need.”

Advances in chip technology have largely been around size, Cho points out, with transistors becoming smaller and smaller and therefore enabling microprocessors to become more powerful by incorporating more of them. What hasn’t fundamentally changed, however, is design. The embedded electronics systems in all the products we use every day depend on an ever-increasing number of chips that each performs a different function. That makes building these systems costly and complicated, inhibiting mass implementation of new technologies – including those powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Ubitium’s alternative is a universal chip that can do multiple jobs. "We replace existing specialised processors and enable advanced AI at no additional cost nor complexity," Cho says.

So far, the company has built a proof-of-concept emulation that shows its universal processor works, with today’s fund-raising enabling it to move forward to a working prototype in 2025. The company expects to go into commercial production in 2026, with Cho confident that its technology will prove game-changing. “More computing power should not require more complexity,” he says. “We’re going to help customers break free from that.”

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These are quite some promises from a company that has yet to move into commercial production, let alone make any actual sales. However, Cho points to the pedigree of his co-founders as one reason to be confident in Ubitium. Vorbach is a veteran of the semiconductor industry who holds more than 200 patents now licensed by major US chip companies and has spent 15 years developing the technology on which Ubitium is built. Weber has served in senior roles at companies including Intel, Texas Instruments and Dialog Semiconductors.

In a global semiconductor market expected to be worth $700 billion next year, the company’s investors are certainly excited. Today’s round is co-led by Runa Capital, Inflection and KBC Focus Fund.

Dmitry Galperin, a general partner at Runa, says the company has enormous potential. “We are impressed by Ubitium’s unique approach to processor micro-architecture, which is now able to adapt to any type of workload – from simple control logic to massive parallel data flow processing.”

“It is an enormous breakthrough that will reduce the cost and complexity of bringing new electronic products to market,” adds Rudi Severijns, investment director at KBC Focus Fund. “What previously required multiple teams to collaborate on hardware and software design now becomes purely a software project.”

Jonatan Luther-Bergquist, a partner at Inflection, is also convinced. “Ubitium was a perfect fit as a contrarian bet on a stellar team working on generalised compute capacity in a world of chip specialisation,” he says of the venture firm's investment in the business.

As it moves towards commercialisation, Ubitium’s vision is to develop a portfolio of chips that vary in size but share the same micro-architecture and software stack, and can power everything from small, embedded devices to high-performance computing systems. The company believes this approach will enable customers to scale their applications without changing their development process, with a workload-agnostic design that makes the processor adaptable to new computing tasks without specialised modifications.