Multiverse Computing raises 189 million and presents its candidacy to be the new Spanish 'unicorn'.
Date: 16/06/2025
Multiverse Computing, a leading Spanish startup specializing in quantum artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, has closed a series B funding round of €189 million ($215 million), up from initial plans of €150 million. The deal, which the firm has been working on for many months, is one of the largest funding rounds of the year in Spain and makes the Basque company one of the contenders to be a new unicorn (startup that reaches a valuation of €1 billion).
The Series B round is led by Bullhound Capital and is backed by top-tier investors such as HP Tech Ventures, SETT, Forgepoint Capital International, CDP Venture Capital, Santander Climate VC, Quantonation, Toshiba and Capital Riesgo de Euskadi-Grupo SPRI. In this sense, Multiverse Computing will have a participation of the State through SETT, known as the digital Sepi, which has committed an investment of more than 59 million euros.
In 2024, the firm closed a €25 million round led by Columbus Venture Partners, and with the participation of Quantonation Ventures, the European Innovation Council Fund, Redstone QAI Quantum Fund, and Inri Partners among other investors.
The company says it has assembled a strong network of international and strategic investors to drive this new phase. Multiverse has developed CompactifAI, a compression technology capable of reducing the size of large language models (LLMs) by up to 95% while maintaining performance. After spending 2024 developing the technology and initially deploying it with selected customers, the new investment will accelerate widespread adoption of the technology, addressing the high costs that currently limit model deployment of LLMs, and thus revolutionize the $106.03 billion AI inference market.
LLMs typically run on specialized cloud-based infrastructures, which drives up data center costs considerably. Traditional compression techniques-such as quantization and pruning-attempt to mitigate these challenges, but the resulting models tend to deliver much lower performance than the original LLMs. With the development of CompactifAI, Multiverse has come up with a new approach. The CompactifAI model generates highly compressed versions of the most advanced open source LLM models on the market, which retain the original accuracy, run four to 12 times faster, and enable inference costs to be reduced by 50% to 80%. These affordable and energy-efficient compressed models can run in the cloud, in private data centers or - in the case of ultra-compressed LLMs - directly on devices such as PCs, phones, cars, drones or even on a Raspberry Pi.
"Until now it was assumed that reducing the size of LLMs meant sacrificing performance. Multiverse is changing that idea," says Enrique Lizaso Olmos, founder and CEO of Multiverse Computing, who adds that "what started as a breakthrough in model compression has become a transformative technology: opening up new possibilities for efficiency in AI deployment and achieving rapid adoption thanks to its ability to radically reduce the hardware requirements needed to run AI models. With a unique group of global strategic and expert investors, and with Bullhound Capital as a lead investor, we can now further advance our commitment to delivering compressed AI models with exceptional performance and minimal infrastructure."