Ubitium Raises $14M to Build Universal Processor for Physical AI Machines

OpenOcean participated alongside existing investors KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital and Inflection. Florian Seibel, co-founder and co-CEO of European defense technology company Quantum Systems, also joined the round.

Ubitium builds custom silicon for autonomous machines, also known as physical AI, that perform physical work such as drones, robots, industrial equipment and self-driving vehicles. The company is developing a single universal processor to replace today's more specialized chips.

Autonomous AI machines rely on three different functions: signal processing for sensing, artificial intelligence inference and orchestration. These functions are generally stitched together across circuitry or silicon with wiring, allowing a machine to perceive, think and act in the real world. Today's developers divide that work across a signal processor, a neural processing unit or graphics processing unit, and a central processing unit for control. The interconnection adds latency, data transfer time, coordination and engineering complexity.

Ubitium built a single processor using RISC-V technology and separate specialized logic as one array of programmable elements for signal processing, AI and real-time control. RISC-V is a free, open-source architecture based on reduced instruction set principles. It is open and royalty-free, unlike proprietary frameworks such as those from Intel and Arm, or CUDA, the standard underpinning Nvidia's chipset.

“Physical AI machines bring a whole new set of computing challenges, and the inference isn’t the hardest one,” Chief Executive and co-founder Hyun Shin Cho said. “Sensing the real world and controlling the machine in it are just as hard, and today those still run on separate chips. We built one Physical AI processor that does all three, proved it in silicon in a year, and this funding turns it into a product.”

Nvidia currently dominates the physical AI market by a wide margin, acting as the gravitational center by providing hardware and software stacks. Estimates for the global market vary, but it is projected to surpass $430 billion by 2030 and approach $1.6 trillion by 2040, according to a ResearchAndMarkets.com research report.

Ubitium's first chip, the UB108 with 256 processing elements, was manufactured on Samsung's 8nm process and proved that the three processes could work together on a single silicon die. The company plans to roll out its first commercial processor, the UB410 with 4,096 processing elements, and deliver units for evaluation in 2027.