San Mateo
California, USA
Headquarters & commercial
Company
Nine years spent on the part everyone else skips
Founded in 2017 by Mihai Raneti, CyberSwarm started with a question about materials rather than a question about architectures: if a component can store a value and multiply by it at the same time, what kind of machine can you build?
The premise
Memory and computation were never supposed to be separate
Every conventional processor keeps them apart and pays a toll on every operation to move data between them. Biology does not work that way. A synapse is memory and computation in one place, and it costs almost nothing to maintain.
A memristor is the closest electronic analogue we have. CyberSwarm started in Ploiești, in a lab rather than a slide deck, working out how to write reliable resistive states into an IGZO thin film and how to read them back without disturbing them. Everything since, the array, the compiler, the runtime. Sits on top of that work.
The device physicists who filed the founding patents still work here. Viorel-Georgel Dumitru, Cristina Besleaga Stan, Alin Velea, Aurelian-Cătălin Galca are named on the core grants. The IP and the lab are the same effort.
Physics first
We do not simulate a brain on top of a digital machine. The computation happens in the material. Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s law do the multiply-accumulate, for free.
Edge-native, not edge-adapted
The engine was designed for the constraint that matters in the physical world: a fixed power budget, no network, and a decision that has to land in milliseconds.
Own the stack that matters
Device, array, compiler and runtime are developed together. That is why the portfolio starts at the material and ends at a deployable model.
Sovereign by construction
Inference never leaves the device. No cloud dependency, no telemetry, no third party in the loop. That is a property of the architecture, not a policy setting.
Timeline
Nine years, left to right
Drag the rail, or use the arrows. Nothing moves on its own.
The team
Nine people, and the nine years behind them
Device physics, array architecture, the toolchain, and the people who keep all three funded and explained. Seven of the nine are pictured here.
Mihai Raneti
Founder and Chief Executive
Started the company in 2017 and has been raising money for the architecture ever since, including the eight years before anyone said yes.
Viorel Dumitru
Chief Scientist
The physics the whole thing rests on: how a resistive state is written into a thin film, and how reliably it stays there.
Andrei Iliescu
Neuromorphic Engineering
Turning devices into an array that computes: the crossbar, the tiling, and what happens at the edges of both.
Gabriel Dinu
Software Engineering
The toolchain a partner actually touches. Export from PyTorch, the compiler, the runtime and the simulator behind them.
Delia Nan
Communications and brand
How the company explains itself, from the brand identity through to what the press gets when they call.
Cristina Huides
Marketing
Getting the work in front of the people who can use it, across the six industries the engine is built for.
Veronica Gaftoi
Finance
The runway. Nine years of device research funded through to a Series A is a finance achievement as much as an engineering one.
Inside the lab
Where the device actually comes from
Grow the film, ask what it became, then measure it one device at a time. The photographs below run in that order, because that is the order the work happens in.
Photograph 1 of 13. Where the film is grown.
01 / 13
Where the film is grown
Everything starts inside this. The chamber is pumped down before anything is deposited, because at ordinary pressure the layer would grow with the room in it. What comes out is a film a few tens of nanometres thick whose electrical behaviour is decided by how it was grown, not by anything done to it afterwards.
Fabrication and characterisation are shared with partner research institutes.
Locations
Three sites, one engineering effort
Device fabrication, characterisation, architecture and software sit close enough together that a measurement in the lab reaches the compiler team the same week.
Bucharest
Romania
Architecture, silicon & software
Ploiești
Romania
Device fabrication & characterisation lab
“Tim Draper was the 1,214th investor I spoke to, after roughly 16,000 emails sent over a period of eight years.”
“This Series A marks the beginning of the next phase for CyberSwarm and for neuromorphic computing itself. We believe the future of AI will require entirely new architectures, and CyberSwarm is building toward that future.”
For investors
Why this architecture, and why now
A $50 million Series A led by Falanga Invest, with Draper Associates backing the company since 2018. The market thesis, what the money is being spent on, the traction behind it and an honest account of the risk that is still ahead.
Read the investment case- $50M
- Series A
- Falanga Invest
- Led by
- 2018
- Draper backed since
We are hiring across device physics and software.
If you want to work on the layer under the layer, write to us at office@cyber-swarm.net.