# Dresden-based Sparxity closes a Series A taking total funding to $90 million, backed by Lockheed Martin Ventures, GlobalFoundries, and the EIC Fund. Europe's first sparse-native AI chip company is now deployed at JUPITER, the continent's fastest supercomputer.
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## Public content

**issue:** 29
**type:** pulse
**date range:** 11 Nov 2026
**tagline:** Dresden-based Sparxity closes a Series A taking total funding to $90 million, backed by Lockheed Martin Ventures, GlobalFoundries, and the EIC Fund. Europe's first sparse-native AI chip company is now deployed at JUPITER, the continent's fastest supercomputer.
**published at:** 2026-11-11
**sections:** 
  -     **body:** On **10 November**, Dresden-based **Sparxity** (formerly SpiNNcloud, a TU Dresden spin-off) closed its **Series A**, taking total funding to **$90 million**. The round was led by **ICM HPQC Fund**, with participation from **Lockheed Martin Ventures**, **GlobalFoundries**, GS Futures, Cloudberry Ventures, TGFS, and the **EIC Fund**.

Sparxity builds chips for **dynamic sparsity**: at inference, most of a neural network's nodes are inactive for a given input. The chip skips unused parts, claiming up to **44x faster AI inference** on ultra-sparse models and **18x less energy** on certain machine learning workloads. The company was selected for the **EIC Accelerator** in 2025, receiving **€10 million** in grants and equity.

Revenue quadrupled between 2024 and 2025. Sparxity has shipped over **70,000 chips** across three designs and counts more than **30 customers**, including major supercomputing centres. Its most significant deployment: a multi-million-dollar system at **Jülich Supercomputing Centre** (home of JUPITER, Europe's fastest supercomputer), installed in October 2026. **T-Systems** (Deutsche Telekom's B2B division) has signed a letter of intent to bring the technology into its data centres.
    **emoji:** 💡
    **label:** SPARSE AI CHIPS
    **heading:** Sparxity closes Series A, bringing total funding to $90M with US defence and chip industry backing
  -     **body:** Most European AI infrastructure runs on Nvidia GPUs: hardware designed, manufactured, and controlled in the US. Sparxity's thesis is that **sparsity-native chips** represent a structurally different approach. Rather than competing on dense compute throughput, it targets the energy and latency cost of sparse inference, where most of a network is irrelevant to a given task.

**GlobalFoundries** joining as an investor matters: GF operates fab facilities in Dresden. A European AI chip company, backed by a local fab operator, deployed at Europe's fastest supercomputer, and EIC-selected is a coherent story about sovereign compute infrastructure.

**For founders:** Sparxity's path to Series A ran through the EIC Accelerator, which provided €10 million in grants and equity before this round. The **2027 EIC Work Programme** is funded at €1.8 billion and includes the EIC Accelerator. If you are building in AI hardware, edge compute, or energy-efficient inference, that route is real and is not crowded.
    **emoji:** 🔬
    **label:** WHY IT MATTERS
    **heading:** European sovereign AI compute gets its first chip company at venture scale

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