Quantum-inspired technology reduces AI costs by up to 80%

Spanish startup Multiverse Computing has raised $215 million (€189 million) in Series B funding for its revolutionary technology, CompactifAI. The technology is notable for reducing the size of large language models (LLMs) by up to 95% without compromising their performance.

Quantum-inspired compression solution

CompactifAI is a compression technology inspired by quantum computing, which is especially useful for compressing small open-source LLMs. Multiverse currently offers the following models in “slim” versions:

• Llama 4 Scout

• Llama 3.3 70B

• Llama 3.1 8B

• Mistral Small 3.1

DeepSeek R1 is also planned for release soon. The company does not support closed models like OpenAI.

Up to 80% savings in inference costs

Using Multiverse’s compressed models provides 4x-12x faster results, which reduces inference costs by up to 50–80%. For example, the Llama 4 Scout Slim version on AWS costs just $0.10 per million tokens, while the regular version costs $0.14.

The company says that the models can be used not only on servers, but also on personal computers, smartphones, cars, drones, and even mini devices like the Raspberry PI. This is a big step towards further popularizing AI.

Team and scientific foundation

One of the founders of the startup, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Román Orús is a professor at the Donostia International Physics Center and a leading scientist in tensor networks. Tensor networks are a tool used to simulate the capabilities of quantum computers on classical computers, and today they are actively used to compress deep learning models.

CEO Enrique Lizaso Olmos has multiple degrees in mathematics and is also known as a former bank manager (former Deputy CEO of Unnim Bank).

Investors and market position

The Series B investment round was led by:

Bullhound Capital (one of the investors in Spotify, Revolut, Discord)

• HP Tech Ventures

• Forgepoint Capital

• Santander Climate VC

• Toshiba, CDP Venture Capital, Capital Riesgo de Euskadi, etc.

To date, the startup has raised a total of over $250 million in investments. Multiverse currently has 160 patents and works with over 100 global clients (including Iberdrola, Bosch, Bank of Canada).