Spanish artificial intelligence company Multiverse Computing announced Thursday it has raised €189 million ($217 million) to scale its AI model compression technology, marking the largest funding round for a Spanish AI startup as companies race to reduce the massive computational costs of deploying large language models.
The Series B round, led by Bullhound Capital with participation from HP Tech Ventures, Forgepoint Capital, Toshiba and other investors, will help Multiverse expand its CompactifAI technology that can compress large language models by up to 95% while maintaining their performance. The funding targets the $106 billion AI inference market.
CompactifAI uses quantum-inspired tensor networks to create compressed versions of popular open-source models including Meta's Llama, China's DeepSeek, and France's Mistral12. The compression makes models run 4x to 12x faster while reducing inference costs by 50% to 80%, enabling advanced AI models to run on devices ranging from smartphones to Raspberry Pi computers rather than requiring expensive cloud infrastructure34.
"The prevailing wisdom is that shrinking LLMs comes at a cost. Multiverse is changing that," said Enrique Lizaso Olmos, founder and CEO5. The approach differs from traditional compression methods like quantization and pruning, which typically reduce model performance.
"For the first time in history, we are able to profile the inner workings of a neural network to eliminate billions of spurious correlations," said Román Orús, co-founder and chief scientific officer4.
The funding positions Multiverse alongside European AI leaders including France's Mistral, Germany's Aleph Alpha, and UK-based Synthesia as companies compete to make AI more efficient and accessible12.
"We are focused just on compressing the most used open-source LLMs, the ones that the companies are already using," Lizaso Olmos told Reuters2. "When you go to a corporation, most of them are using the Llama family of models."
Founded in 2019 by Lizaso Olmos, Orús, Alfonso Rubio and Sam Mugel, the San Sebastián-based company previously raised €25 million in 2024 and received €12.5 million from the European Innovation Council in 20211. Multiverse has offices across Europe and North America and recently expanded to San Francisco12.
The tool is available on Amazon Web Services' AI marketplace and has attracted clients including BBVA, Crédit Agricole and BASF13.
