Investors in the Spanish firm’s Series C round included National Bank’s NAventures, as well as venture units of major European firms BNP Paribas, Orange and Scania. The financing values Multiverse at US$1.7 billion before the new capital. (The Logic)

Talking point: The startup’s technology makes AI more efficient, squashing models so that they require less memory and compute capacity, making them cheaper to run—and, Multiverse claims, faster and more sustainable. It could also help AI run on devices instead of in data centres. Multiverse is headquartered in the Basque city of San Sebastián, but the firm’s chief technology officer Samuel Mugel and chief technical product officer John Malcolm are both based in Toronto; its Canadian R&D hub hosts 15 of the firm’s 300 or so staff. Multiverse started out in 2019 developing algorithms for quantum computers, graduating from the Creative Destruction Lab accelerator program the following year. But the firm has found its market in the current era of AI, and the specialized chips that power it. Multiverse has recently worked with Intel and Nvidia to prove its technology can produce useful models running on their hardware.