. Europe’s only provider of AI chips that are more powerful, energy efficient and cost-effective than other solutions from global market leaders
. Funding to enable VSORA to produce its cutting-edge AI chip in 2025
Paris, France – April 29th, 2025 – VSORA, a French innovator and the only European provider of ultra-high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) inference chips, today announced that it has successfully raised €40 million in a new fundraising round. The investment was led by Otium and another French family office, with additional participation from Omnes Capital, Adélie Capital and co-financing from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund.
Founded in France, VSORA is revolutionizing AI processing with its unique chip, engineered for superior performance and efficiency – designed for key applications such as generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT), autonomous driving, robotics and edge AI.
The explosive growth of AI and generative AI applications has triggered an urgent demand for high-performance, cost-effective inference solutions. AI inference – the process of deploying trained AI models to generate real-time insights and predictions – is projected to grow at a 16% CAGR from $124 billion in 2025 to $255 billion in 2030.
VSORA’s flagship product, the Jotunn8 (J8) chip, shatters the performance barriers of conventional GPUs, delivering concrete performance that surpasses today’s AI chips from global leading industry players. Specifically, J8 delivers more than three times the performance of existing solutions, while consuming less than half the power. This significant leap in efficiency addresses the critical challenges of deployment cost, cost per query and energy consumption in large-scale AI deployment.
Khaled Maalej, VSORA founder and CEO, said: “This funding marks a pivotal moment for VSORA as we accelerate our mission to revolutionize AI chips and ensure Europe’s technological sovereignty in AI computing. It will drive the finalization of our technology and the launch of our production, enabling VSORA to play a crucial role as the sole alternative to non-European chip designers. We are deeply grateful for our investors’ trust and look forward to continuing our collaboration with industry leaders to bring our chip to market.”
The new funding will support the production of VSORA’s J8 chip, targeted for 2025. The company has forged partnerships with world industry leaders, ensuring access to cutting-edge semiconductor technologies and production capabilities that meet the highest standards of quality and performance.
In parallel, VSORA continues to move forward with strategic stakeholders to prepare for the industrialization phase, paving the way for the emergence of a key global European player in AI chip innovation.
Gaspard de Veyrac, Principal at Otium, commented: “In a market dominated by global giants like Nvidia, VSORA is a unique opportunity for France and Europe, home to world-class engineering talent. Otium is proud to provide them with the means to realize their ambitions. With this funding, VSORA has the necessary tools to reshape the future of AI computation and secure a significant position in the global AI chip market.”
VSORA’s flagship product, the Jotunn8 (J8) chip, is set to redefine AI inference processing. Built on a novel chiplet-based architecture, the J8 delivers superior compute performance while dramatically reducing power consumption and infrastructure costs. Unlike traditional accelerators optimized for training, VSORA’s technology focuses on inference making it ideal for latency-sensitive applications.
Key features of VSORA’s J8 chip:
VSORA provides high-performance silicon solutions for AI datacenter inference, autonomous driving, robotics and edge AI applications. Founded in 2015 by a team of DSP and AI scientists and engineers with a long history of successes, VSORA has offices in Meudon-La-Forêt, France, and Taiwan.
www.vsora.com
Otium is a long-term investment holding company founded in 2009 by Pierre Edouard Sterin. With €1.6 billion in assets as of December 31st, 2024, spread across more than 130 investments – including the Smartbox group and stakes in French unicorns PayFit and Owkin – Otium invests amounts ranging from a few hundred thousand euros to several tens of millions of euros. Companies are funded at every stage of their development, from seed funding to growth capital, and Otium takes either majority or minority stakes with no holding period constraints. Otium pursues a diversification strategy by financing projects in tech, industrials, leisure, healthcare, hospitality and real estate. Otium invested €255 million in 2024.
www.otiumcapital.com
Omnes Capital is a leading private equity firm dedicated to the energy transition. With over €6.7 bn in assets under management, their teams support long-term partnerships with entrepreneurs through four core businesses: renewable energy, sustainable cities, deeptech and co-investment. For over 20 years, Omnes Capital has been applying its expertise to help businesses grow in more than 15 countries, with a particular focus on sustainable development. As part of its approach as a responsible investor, the company has created the Omnes Foundation to support non-profit organisations working for children and young people in the fields of education, health, social and economic integration.
www.omnescapital.com
The European Innovation Council Fund from the European Commission is an agnostic Fund: it invests across all technologies and verticals, and all EU countries and countries associated to Horizon Europe. It provides the investment component of the EIC Accelerator blended finance. The European Investment Bank acts as investment adviser to the EIC Fund.
The EIC Fund aims to fill a critical financing gap and its main purpose is to support companies in the development and commercialisation of disruptive technologies, bridging with and crowding in market players, and further sharing risk by building a large network of capital providers and strategic partners suitable for co-investments and follow-on funding.
The Fund pays particular attention to the empowerment and support of female founders as well as the ambition to reduce the innovation divide among EU countries.
eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund_en
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Juliette Mouraret
jmouraret@image7.fr
Nanette Collins
nanette@nvc.com