Flow Computing, a trailblazer in licensing on-die ultra-high-performance parallel computing solutions to CPU vendors of all architectures, has officially emerged from stealth with a groundbreaking announcement. The company has secured a total of €4 million in pre-seed funding from several prominent Nordic venture capital firms and business entities.

Flow Computing’s revolutionary technology is designed to integrate seamlessly into any CPU design architecture, instruction set, or process geometry. This innovation delivers a remarkable 100-fold acceleration, transforming standard Von Neumann-based computer designs into “CPU 2.0” levels of throughput. Notably, Flow’s solution eliminates the need for expensive GPU acceleration for CPU instructions in high-performance applications.

At the heart of Flow’s innovation is the Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), an architecture that significantly boosts CPU performance up to 100-fold. The PPU is integrated on-die through a license from Flow and is fully backwards compatible with all existing software applications for that CPU architecture. Existing parallel functionalities in all software and applications can be vastly accelerated by recompiling for the PPU without any changes to the software.

The performance boost scales with the number of PPU cores integrated on-die, and Flow offers optimized licenses for every major tier of the CPU market, including mobile, PC, and supercomputers. Flow’s technology enhances not only the CPU but also benefits the entire device motherboard and connected peripheral boards, such as matrix units, vector units, NPUs, and GPUs.

Flow Computing is already in initial discussions with major semiconductor vendors worldwide who are seeking the “Holy Grail” of next-generation CPU performance. More technical details will be shared publicly in the second half of 2024.

The pre-seed funding round saw participation from Butterfly Ventures (lead VC), FOV Ventures, Sarsia, Stephen Industries, Superhero Capital, and Business Finland. As a spinout from the esteemed VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, VTT holds an equity stake in Flow Computing, and all patented IP developed over several years has been officially transferred to Flow.

Timo Valtonen, co-founder and CEO of Flow Computing, stated, “We firmly believe that CPU performance improvements have been incremental over the last few decades, leading to a situation where the CPU has become the weakest link in computing due to its sub-optimal sequential architecture. A new era in CPU performance is necessary to meet the continuously increasing demand for computing power, driven largely by AI and edge and cloud computing needs. Flow aims to lead the SuperCPU revolution with its radical new Parallel Processing Unit (PPU) architecture, enabling up to 100X the performance of any CPU, regardless of architecture, with full backwards software compatibility.”

Antti Vasara, CEO of VTT, added, “At VTT, we are excited by Flow Computing’s technical innovations as Finland positions itself as a world-leading exporter of cutting-edge semiconductor designs. Flow is providing a complete performance ecosystem not only to CPU vendors but also to the development communities around major CPU designs such as X86, Apple M-Series, Exynos, ARM, and RISC-V. We are thrilled that Flow’s technology, developed at VTT, can significantly contribute to both the Finnish and European computing ecosystems and the future of the global computing industry.”

About Flow Computing

Flow Computing is a pioneering startup based in Helsinki, Finland, enabling the next generation of CPU performance for the most demanding applications, such as locally-hosted AI and general-purpose parallel computing. This performance leap is achieved using the company’s patented Parallel Processing Unit (PPU) licensable architecture and compiler ecosystem. This allows developers to balance raw performance for new applications with maintaining legacy code and application compatibility. Flow’s groundbreaking architecture also enhances embedded systems and data centers, supporting edge and cloud computing, AI clouds, multimedia codecs across 5G/6G, autonomous vehicle systems, military-grade computing, and more.

Flow Computing is poised to revolutionize the CPU industry, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in computational performance and efficiency.