Samsung backs Euclyd’s €200M+ round to challenge Nvidia in AI chips
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu
Samsung just backed Euclyd’s €200M+ chip round to take on Nvidia. The Dutch startup still has no chips shipping, so this is a very expensive bet on promise.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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Euclyd has closed a Series A of more than €200 million, and Samsung is one of the names on the cheque. The round was co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the Scaleup Europe Fund managed by EQT, and Innovation Industries. EIFO, imec.xpand, the Brabant Development Agency, and Quadri also joined in.
That is a big step up from where the company started. Euclyd told CNBC in April it was looking for at least €100 million. By June, Bloomberg had it in talks for up to €200 million. The final round went past that mark, and it also brought in Peter Wennink, the former ASML chief, as chairman. For a startup that began with Bernardo Kastrup sketching early designs in his attic after work, the arc is a little wild.
Euclyd was founded in 2024 at Eindhoven’s High Tech Campus by Kastrup, Atul Sinha, Gerard Egelmeers, Ingolf Held and Harm Peter. Kastrup previously co-founded Silicon Hive, which Intel bought in 2011, and later worked as a technology strategist at ASML. Now the company is betting that GPUs are the wrong machine for AI inference, the phase where a trained model actually answers a prompt.
Its first chip, CRAFTWERK, uses 16,384 custom processors that work directly on data in memory. A rack-scale system called CRAFTWERK Station combines 32 chips and is aimed at one exaflop of compute by 2028. Euclyd says the setup could be up to 100 times as power efficient as Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin chips when modelled on Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick, but that figure is a company projection, not a commercial test result.
The company is pushing a full-stack plan: chip, memory and datacenter systems. That is pricier and slower to prove than the cleaner plays some rivals are chasing, from Axelera AI’s edge focus to OXMIQ’s licensing route. Euclyd says it is in talks with four prospective customers and hopes to start supplying two in 2027. For now, it is still a two-year-old startup asking the market to believe before it ships.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic Europe: if you can’t beat Nvidia with one company, assemble a committee and call it strategy. The real story isn’t the size of the round, it’s that investors keep paying for AI-chip alternatives long before the first serious shipment arrives. That’s fine as long as they stop pretending it’s anything other than a very expensive leap of faith.
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