Ubitium raises $14M to replace a robot’s DSP, NPU and CPU with one chip

Ubitium, a chip start-up founded in Düsseldorf in 2024, has raised $14 million in new seed funding led by Ibex Investors, the company announced on October 13, 2026, taking its total seed funding to $18 million. OpenOcean joined the round alongside existing investors KBC Focus Fund, Runa Capital and Inflection, and Florian Seibel, co-founder and co-CEO of drone maker Quantum Systems, invested personally.

Ubitium’s bet is that the gain in robot compute lies in collapsing the separate chips a machine already carries into one, rather than in adding a bigger AI accelerator.

What does a “universal processor” replace?

A typical machine splits its compute three ways: a DSP for sensor signal processing, an NPU for neural-network inference and a CPU for control. Ubitium’s design is a single reconfigurable RISC-V array of programmable elements with unified memory, which allocates resources between those jobs at runtime and is programmed with standard RISC-V tools. The company says this cuts data transfers between chips, simplifies software and makes machines cheaper to build. “Physical AI machines bring a whole new set of computing challenges, and the inference isn’t the hardest one,” chief executive and co-founder Hyun Shin Cho said in the announcement.

The company says its first chip, the UB108, has run signal processing, AI inference and real-time control on one array. That is a company claim; no independent benchmark has been published. Co-founder and CTO Martin Vorbach has worked on reconfigurable computing for more than three decades, and Ubitium says it holds 17 granted patents with more pending.

Where will Ubitium sell first?

Not in humanoids. Ubitium says its first customers are building sensing systems, such as high-resolution radar and audio, in markets where embedded chips already ship in volume. The full perceive-think-act loop is aimed at autonomous systems, including drones, which is where Seibel comes in: Quantum Systems makes drones. “Ubitium is building the one processor that does that whole job. That’s why I invested,” he said.

By the standards of robot silicon the round is small. China’s D-Robotics raised $400 million for its Sunrise chips, and Chinese humanoid makers are swapping domestic chips into joints and control one board at a time. Ubitium’s pitch is aimed at exactly that patchwork of boards. The test is the UB410, its first commercial processor: whether evaluation units arrive in 2027 as planned, and whether the gains shown on 256 processing elements hold at 4,096.