AI Chip Startup Sparxity Completes Series A, Reaching $90M Total Funding with Backing from Lockheed Martin Ventures
German AI chip startup Sparxity has closed its Series A round, bringing total funding to $90 million. The round was led by ICM HPQC Fund with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures and GlobalFoundries. The company has also signed a Letter of Intent with Deutsche Telekom for a 2028 deployment.
Dresden-based AI chip startup Sparxity (formerly SpiNNcloud) has announced the completion of its Series A round, bringing its 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 European Innovation Council Fund. Angel investors included Richard Socher, co-founder of Recursive Superintelligence, and Nancy Xu, founder of Moonhub.
Sparxity focuses on "sparse-native computing," aiming to improve AI efficiency and reduce energy consumption by skipping irrelevant calculations in models. CEO Hector Gonzalez stated that this vision accelerates the transition from dense, energy-intensive architectures to heterogeneous datacenters with dedicated silicon for ultra-sparse workloads. Gonzalez noted that Sparxity is not directly competing with Nvidia, which excels in dense workloads; its primary competitor is Moffett AI, based in Shenzhen.
Beyond financial support, Sparxity has signed a Letter of Intent with Deutsche Telekom, with the first deployment scheduled for 2028. Previously, the company's technology had been deployed at several research centers and universities, including Sandia National Labs in the US, Leipzig University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
Sparxity claims its technology enables 10x faster sparse solvers, 18x lower energy use for event-based machine learning, and 20x shorter runtimes on optimization problems. The new funding will be used to launch a second product, support a tapeout for next-generation sparse AI chips, and cover production to meet current orders. Despite significant public grants, Sparxity's total funding remains lower than single-round raises by some inference-chip startups, such as Axelera AI ($250 million) and Fractile ($220 million).