AMSIMCEL – HyperPV raises EUR 4.8M blended financing through EIC
Bucharest, Romania, October 17th, 2022
AMSIMCEL was selected among the 75 innovative start-ups to receive €400 million, all together, from the EU
- AMSIMCEL – selected out of 1092 companies submitting full proposals
- The second breakthrough for the Romanian start-ups ecosystem, after dotLumen
- 4.8M blended financing over the next 3 years
- The funding will be used to develop the company, extend the product features, commercial enhancement, and market expansion
- The Romanian startup AMSIMCEL is a Techcelerator backed & invested alumnus from 2019
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.
AMSIMCEL – Key player in the new wave of deep tech start-ups in the region to receive EIC Accelerator grants and equity investments.
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.
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 specializes in high-performance computing for accelerating integrated circuit design, deep learning, and verification of complex systems – and 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 massively 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 global 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.
“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.
About Amsimcel
AMSIMCEL is a High-Performance Computing (HPC) startup that brings the unprecedented GPU capabilities into the next generation of Integrated Circuits (IC) design tools for their Physical Design Verification. We aim to disrupt the Physical Verification (PV) field with hyperPV: the first GPU- Powered Physical Verification Framework.
About the European Innovation Council (EIC)
The EIC is Europe’s flagship innovation program to identify, develop, and scale up breakthrough technologies and game-changing innovations.
About Techcelerator
Techcelerator is the SEED accelerator that is targeting high-tech startups in Romania and South-East Europe. Headquartered in Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, Techcelerator is the first accelerator in Romania to allocate funds for the development of high-tech companies in the acceleration and post-acceleration phases. Innovative young companies with high potential for international development and expansion from growing industries such as FinTech, B2B SaaS, eHealth, PropTech, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and others are targeted for acceleration and investment. Techcelerator benefits from the strategic support offered by GapMinder, Google for Startups and collaborates with several other local and European investors to support the tech ecosystem in Romania and South-East Europe.
Techcelerator has supported over 240 start-ups through previous accelerator rounds and various support programs, organized by itself or in partnership with other entities in the ecosystem. Techcelerator’s portfolio companies have benefited from a total investment of over €20 million from the preSeed and Seed investment rounds attracted so far in the five years since its launch.
