On Thursday, Spanish startup Multiverse Computing announced that it raised an enormous Series B round of €189 million (about $215 million) on the strength of a technology it calls “CompactifAI.”
CompactifAI is a quantum-computing inspired compression technology that is capable of reducing the size of LLMs by up to 95% without impacting model performance, the company says.
Specifically, Multiverse offers compressed versions of well-known open source LLMs – primarily small models – such as Llama 4 Scout, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral Small 3.1. However, it will soon release a version of DeepSeek R1, with more open source and reasoning models coming soon. Proprietary models from OpenAI and others are not supported.
It’s “slim” models, as the company calls them, are available on Amazon Web Services or can be licensed for on-premises uses. The company says its models are 4x-12x faster than the comparable not-compressed versions, which translates to 50%-80% reduction in inference costs. For instance, Multiverse says that its Lama 4 Scout Slim costs 10 cents per million tokens on AWS compared to Lama 4 Scout’s 14 cents.
The company says that some of its models can be made so small and energy efficient they could be run on PCs, phones, cars, drones and even the DIY-enthusiast’s favorite tiny PC, Raspberry PI. (We are suddenly imagining those fantastical Raspberry PI Christmas-light houses upgraded with LLM-powered interactive talking Santas.)
Multiverse has some technical might behind it. It was co-founded by CTO Román Orús, a professor at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián, Spain. Orús is known for his pioneering work on tensor networks (not to be confused with all AI-related things named Tensor at Google).
Tensor networks are computational tools that mimic quantum computers but run on classic computers. One of their primary uses these days is compression of deep learning models.
Multiverse’s co-founder and CEO, Enrique Lizaso Olmos, also holds multiple mathematical degrees and has been a college professor. He spent most of his career in banking, best known as the former deputy CEO of Unnim Bank.
The Series B was led by Bullhound Capital (which has backed companies like Spotify, Revolut, DeliveryHero, Avito, Discord) along with participation of HP Tech Ventures, SETT, Forgepoint Capital International, CDP Venture Capital, Santander Climate VC, Toshiba and Capital Riesgo de Euskadi – Grupo SPR.
Multiverse says it has 160 patents and 100 customers globally, including Iberdrola, Bosch, and the Bank of Canada. With this funding, it has raised about $250M to date.