Romanian high-performance computing start-up Amsimcel-HyperPV raises EUR 4.8M

Romanian startup AMSIMCEL, the first GPU-Powered Physical Verification Framework with High-Performance Computing capabilities attracts EUR 4.8M blended financing through the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator.

The company ranks among the 75 innovative European start-ups that will receive financial support worth €400 million, all together, in the form of grants and equity investments from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator. AMSIMCEL is a Techcelerator alumnus & Investment Readiness acceleration program. Techcelerator assisted the EIC Fund application process.

The companies were selected following a highly competitive process, in which 232 companies were interviewed by juries of experienced investors and entrepreneurs from a total of more than 1000 applications.

Read more about

East European Coffee Culture Festival: brewing excitement this weekend

read more

The EIC Accelerator is one of the most competitive funding programs at the European level, where the success rate is 8.1%, and the top 3 places in attracting funding are occupied by France, Germany, and Israel, countries with a tradition in the area of innovation and technological development. The selected companies have a wide geographical spread, covering 21 countries and 20% of them have women at the top. In addition, the latest round of applications for the EIC Accelerator closed on 5 October, with a further 1092 companies submitting full proposals.

In most cases, companies receive the grant funding in the next two to three months, while the first investment decisions will be made next year. Applications that meet all the criteria in the remote evaluation stage and are assessed positively by the EIC jury, but are not recommended for funding, will receive a seal of excellence to help them find alternative sources of funding.

AMSIMCEL is a deep-tech startup developing the next-generation platform for the verification of leading-edge chips founded in 2017 in Romania by Catalin Tugui (38), Co-Founder, CEO & Physical Design Verification Engineer, Emanuel Dogaru (35), Co-Founder & CTO and Gabriel Donici (38), Co-Founder & Advisor. Anca Marcu (35), CFO, ACCA-certified financial expert, with previous executive experience in start-ups and banking played a key role in the funding submission process.

The company is specialized in high-performance computing for accelerating integrated circuit design, deep learning, and verification of complex systems – proposes hyperPV – the first physical verification framework powered by graphics processing units (GPUs). At the core of the framework is hyperDRC, a high-performance computing DRC engine that enables unprecedented acceleration of physical concept verification. Leveraging the massive parallel computing capabilities of modern general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), the company’s proprietary algorithms deliver fast results (up to 20 times faster than leading competitors) and achieve near-linear scalability for 100 GPU nodes. The hyperDRC engine is exposed through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, hyperCloud, which provides a clean, customizable
interface that allows seamless integration with existing workflows and easy customization of execution sets.

4.8M blended financing through EIC Accelerator

Over the next three years, AMSIMCEL will expand through a total EIC financing of EUR 2.5M grant + EUR 1.1M equity component,  co-financed by an additional VC round of EUR 1.2M backed by existing and new investors.

The funding will be used to develop the company, finalize product development, commercial
enhancement, and market expansion.

“Funding of HyperPV by the European Innovation Council, one the most competitive EU accelerators in the world, is a recognition of the innovation proposed by Amsimcel. HyperPV will strengthen the European Semiconductor Ecosystem by bringing the much-needed disruption and solving the bottlenecks in the existing chip design flows. We took the first step in putting Romania on the global EDA map, as international companies will benefit from this solution in speeding up their chip production and quickly releasing new electronic products on the market” stated Catalin Tugui Co-Founder & CEO, AMSIMCEL.

Amsimcel is alumnus of Techcelerator & Nvidia Inception, with current investors Techcelerator & GapMinder VC, TechAngels Romania, Plug and Play Tech Center and backed by israelian angel investors from which the start-up previously raised Pre-Seed funding of 500K Euros.

“We had the pleasure to work with AMSIMCEL from 2019 in our deep tech acceleration and also in the Investment Readiness program in the summer of 2022, enhancing their application to EIC Accelerator. Their unique High-Performance Computing DRC engine applied to the electronic design automation (EDA) of chip manufacturing processes is a game changer decreasing by 70% the testing time compared with the traditional way global chip makers are working now.  AMSIMCEL is also another strike for the Romanian start-up ecosystem, after dotLumen, proving that Romania is a consistent pipeline of deep-tech ventures”, declares Cristian Dascalu, Managing Partner, Techcelerator & EIC Ambassador in Romania & SEE.

In December 2021,.lumen, which created the first glasses designed to help the mobility of the blind, won the first grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) accelerator, of 9MEuros.