On Thursday, Spanish startup Multiverse Computing announced that it had raised a massive Series B round of 189 million euros (approximately $2215 million) with the strength of a technology known as “Compact Phi.”
Compactifai is a quantum computation-inspired compression technology that can reduce the size of LLMS by up to 95% without affecting the performance of the model, the company says.
Specifically, Multiverse offers compressed versions (mainly smaller models) of the well-known open source LLM, such as the Llama 4 Scout, Llama 3.3 70b, Llama 3.1 8b, and Mistral Small 3.1. However, we will soon release a version of Deepseek R1, with more open source and inference models coming soon. Unique models such as Openai are not supported.
As the company calls it, the “slim” model can be used with Amazon Web Services or licensed for on-premises use. The company says the model is four times faster than the comparable uncompressed version. This reduces inference costs by 50%-80%. Multiverse, for example, says that Lama 4 Scout Slim costs 10 cents per million token on AWS, compared to 14 cents on Lama 4 Scout.
The company says some of its models are very small, energy efficient and can be run on PCs, phones, cars, drones, and even DIY-Enthusiast’s favorite small PC, the Raspberry Pi. (We suddenly imagine a fantastic Raspberry Pi Christmas Lighthouse upgraded with an interactive talking Santa equipped with LLM.)
Multiverse has the technical potential behind it. It was co-founded by CTO Román Orús, a professor at the Donostia International Physics Centre in San Sebastian, Spain. Orús is known for his pioneering work on tensor networks (not to be confused with all AI-related ones named tensors on Google).
Tensor networks mimic quantum computers, but are computational tools that run on classical computers. One of the main applications these days is compression of deep learning models.
Enrique Lizaso Olmos, co-founder and CEO of Multiverse, also holds multiple mathematics degrees and is a professor at the university. He spent most of his career in banking. The bank is best known as the former assistant CEO of Unnim Bank.
Series B was led by Bullhound Capital (which supports companies such as Spotify, Revolut, Deliverhero, Avito, Discord, and others), along with the participation of HP Tech Ventures, Set, Forgepoint Capital International, CDP Venture Capital, Santander Climate VC, Thiba and Capital Riesgo de Euskadi-Grupo Spr.
According to Multiverse, it has 160 patents and 100 customers worldwide, including Iberdrola, Bosch and Canabs of Canabs. The funding has raised approximately $250 million so far.