Euclyd raises €200M for a European answer to Nvidia's inference grip
Euclyd, an Eindhoven chip startup founded in 2024, closed a Series A of more than €200 million (about $231 million) co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and Innovation Industries, the company announced on September 15. Rounding out the syndicate are EIFO, imec.xpand, the Brabant Development Agency and Quadri. The board appointment matters as much as the money: Peter Wennink, the former ASML president and chief executive who spent more than a decade turning the lithography maker into Europe's most valuable technology company, joins as chairman. Founder and chief executive Bernardo Kastrup — a computer scientist and philosopher who came up through Philips Research, co-founded Silicon Hive (later sold to Intel), and did product strategy at ASML — has been explicit that the bet is not just capital. "Samsung can help us in more ways than money," he told CNBC, pointing to the Korean group's memory manufacturing, systems engineering and supply chain.
The design is where Euclyd earns its raise. Rather than a conventional GPU that burns energy shuttling data back and forth between memory and compute cores, its platform packs some 16,384 custom processors that operate directly on data stored in memory. Kastrup claims that yields up to 100 times better power efficiency for inference workloads than Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin hardware, modelled against Meta's Llama 4 Maverick. Those figures are projections, not measurements from a commercial deployment, and the company's systems remain unproven at scale — a caveat worth holding alongside the headline number. The plan is two revenue streams: selling rack-scale systems to enterprises that want secure, self-hosted inference, and licensing the underlying IP to companies building their own chips. First physical rollouts are targeted for 2028, with thousands of enterprise customers by 2030.
Why it matters now: Euclyd is arriving into a crowded inference race — Cerebras, Etched, Groq and fellow Dutch outfit Axelera AI are all fundraising, while Google, AWS, Meta and OpenAI build their own silicon. What separates Euclyd is the sovereignty thesis. ASML gave Europe dominance in the tools that make chips; Kastrup is arguing that lead means nothing if Europe still imports the chips themselves. We tracked the same inference-hardware land-grab when Gimlet Labs raised $300M to break inference out of the single-chip box. Euclyd is Europe's bid for a seat at that table.
What to watch: whether the 100x efficiency claim survives contact with a real customer workload, and whether 2027's first supply deals (the company is in talks with four prospects) turn the projections into silicon that ships.
Does Europe need its own Nvidia, or is betting on a single inference-chip startup the wrong way to buy technological sovereignty? Tell us in the comments.
