Spanish startup Multiverse Computing on Thursday said it has raised an enormous Series B round of €189 million (about $215 million) on the strength of a technology it calls “CompactifAI.”
CompactifAI is a quantum computing-inspired compression technology that is capable of reducing the size of LLMs by up to 95% without impacting model performance, the company said.
Specifically, Multiverse offers compressed versions of well-known, open source LLMs — primarily small models — such as Llama 4 Scout, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Mistral Small 3.1. The company plans to release a version of DeepSeek R1 soon and said it is working on more open source and reasoning models. Proprietary models from OpenAI and others are not supported.
Its “slim” models, as the company calls them, are available via Amazon Web Services or can be licensed for on-premise usage. The company says its models are 4x to 12x faster than comparable not-compressed versions, which translates to a 50% to 80% reduction in inference costs. For instance, Multiverse says its Llama 4 Scout Slim costs 10 cents per million tokens on AWS compared to Llama 4 Scout’s 14 cents.
Multiverse claims some of its models can be made so small and energy efficient that they can be run on PCs, phones, cars, drones, and even the DIY-enthusiast’s favorite tiny PC, Raspberry Pi. (We are suddenly imagining those fantastical Raspberry Pi Christmas-light houses upgraded with LLM-powered interactive talking Santas.)
Multiverse has some technical might behind it. It was co-founded by its CTO Román Orús, a professor at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián, Spain. Orús is known for his pioneering work on tensor networks (not to be confused with all the AI-related projects named Tensor at Google).
Tensor networks are computational tools that mimic quantum computers but run on normal computers. One of their primary uses these days is compression of deep learning models.
Multiverse’s other co-founder, CEO Enrique Lizaso Olmos, also holds multiple mathematical degrees and has been a college professor. He spent most of his career in banking and is best known as the former deputy CEO of Unnim Banc.
The Series B was led by Bullhound Capital, which has backed companies like Spotify, Revolut, Delivery Hero, Avito, and Discord. HP Tech Ventures, SETT, Forgepoint Capital International, CDP Venture Capital, Santander Climate VC, Toshiba, and Capital Riesgo de Euskadi — Grupo SPR also participated in the round.
Multiverse says it has 160 patents and 100 customers globally, including Iberdrola, Bosch, and the Bank of Canada. With this funding, it has raised about $250 million to date.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/
