Taiwan’s Cathay Venture Makes First French Investment with €32M Bet on SiPearl

Taiwanese venture capital is extending its reach into Europe with Cathay Venture’s €32 million investment in French semiconductor startup SiPearl, completing its €130 million (US$152 million) Series A round. The deal marks Cathay Venture’s first investment in France, reflecting Taiwan’s strategic interest in Europe’s high-performance computing and AI chip sector. 

Backed by Cathay Financial Holdings, the firm joined existing investors, including the European Innovation Council Fund and French Tech Souveraineté. 

SiPearl is developing energy-efficient, high-performance processors that aim to power European supercomputers and AI applications, aligning with the EU’s drive for technological sovereignty. 

SiPearl said the Series A round is the largest ever for a European fabless semiconductor company and will support the industrialization of its Rhea1 processor. The company also plans to accelerate its research and development for next-generation chips, targeting supercomputing, data centers, AI, and enterprise applications. A Series B funding round is expected to launch soon as the company moves into its next growth phase.

Founded in 2020 under the European Processor Initiative (EPI), SiPearl aims to strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty by creating high-performance, energy-efficient processors. The startup has grown to a team of 200 employees across Italy, France, and Spain, and operates sovereign data centers in France for chip design and emulation. Its work supports the EU’s broader goal to reduce reliance on non-European semiconductor technologies.

The company recently achieved a major milestone with the tape-out of Rhea1, its first Arm-based central processing unit (CPU). The processor has been handed over to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) to start manufacturing and will be available for sampling in early 2026, according to the company.

Rhea1 is built using TSMC’s 6nm N6 process and contains 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, each featuring dual 256-bit Scalable Vector Extensions to optimize performance and energy use. The chip integrates four HBM2E memory stacks for high bandwidth and four DDR5 interfaces that support two DIMMs per channel, making it suitable for AI inference, big data processing, and high-performance computing workloads.

The processor will power the CPU cluster of the JUPITER supercomputer, located at Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich. JUPITER is set to become Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, with the partial system, Jupiter Booster, already ranked fourth on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Philippe Notton, SiPearl’s founder and CEO, said the Rhea1 tape-out represents a strategic breakthrough for Europe. “With the most complex processor ever designed in Europe, we are proving that the continent can compete with non-European leaders,” he said. Notton also emphasized the importance of collaboration with Taiwan, describing it as a key partner in the global semiconductor ecosystem.

For Cathay Venture, the investment marks its first in France and aligns with its focus on semiconductors and electronics. The firm, part of Cathay Financial Holdings, has a portfolio that includes RISC-V chipmaker Rivos, travel superapp KKDay, and insurtech startup OneDegree. Stanley Yu, assistant vice president at Cathay Venture, said SiPearl is “one of the few chip companies tackling both computing power and energy efficiency for modern data centers.”

Image credits: Cathay Venture