A Dutch startup founded just over a year ago in an attic in Eindhoven is seeking to raise at least €100 million. Its prominent backers have attracted significant attention in the semiconductor industry.
Euclyd, founded in 2024 by former ASML director Bernardo Kastrup, is negotiating with investors to raise at least €100 million, according to CNBC. The company previously secured a seed round of under €10 million and now seeks funding to scale its technology and start serving initial clients.
Kastrup, a computer scientist and philosopher, previously worked at Philips Research, Silicon Hive (later acquired by Intel), and ASML, focusing on product strategy. When generative AI surged in 2023, he saw a lack of efforts in Europe to develop next-generation inference silicon and decided to address this gap by founding Euclyd.
The company’s product, CRAFTWERK, is a chip system designed specifically for AI inference rather than adapted from gaming GPUs. Unlike conventional GPUs, which use significant energy to transfer data between memory and compute cores, Euclyd’s architecture processes data simultaneously across multiple locations.
According to Kastrup, this approach greatly improves efficiency for inference workloads. The company claims its system delivers 100 times greater power efficiency for inference than NVIDIA‘s latest Vera Rubin chips, though this figure has not been validated through large-scale commercial deployment. A multi-chiplet version is expected by 2028.
Euclyd’s advisory board adds significant credibility. Its backers include former ASML CEO Peter Wennink, Federico Faggin, who designed the world’s first commercial microprocessor at Intel, and Steven Schuurman, founder of Elastic. Wennink led ASML, a key chipmaking equipment company, for a decade. Faggin, now in his eighties, is a notable figure in semiconductor history.
Euclyd is in discussions with four potential clients, aiming to supply two next year and two the year after. The capital raised will support scaling from prototype to initial delivery.