Amsimcel and the EIC Accelerator: GPU Chip Checks, Few Sales

Amsimcel, founded in 2017 in Romania by Catalin Tugui, Emanuel Dogaru and Gabriel Donici, develops HyperPV, software that runs physical verification of chip designs on graphics processors instead of CPU farms. Its EIC project said checking a leading-edge design against a foundry's rules can take weeks on more than 100 CPUs, and that HyperPV would be "the first GPU-Powered Physical Verification Framework", offered as a cloud service, according to CORDIS.

The European Innovation Council granted €2,500,000 towards a €3.7 million project from January 2023 to July 2025. The company announced €4.8 million of blended financing through the EIC, combining grant and equity. The final report says the engine was optimised and achieved "foundry-level validation on a proprietary semiconductor process", two pilots were running, ISO 9001 certification was obtained and integration with existing chip design tools was released. Amsimcel's turnover was RON 235,084, roughly €47,000, in 2025, with a net loss of RON 869,956 and RON 57,581 in cash at year end, according to its filings shown by totalfirme.ro.

Where Amsimcel Stands Now

In April 2025 Amsimcel told the news agency SeeNews it wanted to raise €6 million in a seed round to certify HyperPV for advanced chip processes and launch in the US and Asia, and that it had secured $3 million in grants and equity so far, according to the company's newsroom. No closing of that round has been announced. HyperPV runs on Nvidia GPUs, and Amsimcel is part of Nvidia's Inception programme for start-ups. In 2026 it presented at a chiplet and advanced packaging show. Its report says it is pursuing a technology transfer agreement with a semiconductor foundry in France.

The Technology: Design Rule Checks on GPUs

Before a chip is made, its layout must be checked against thousands of manufacturing rules; the report says a 7 nm process has more than 20,000 rules. HyperPV uses a proprietary computational geometry library written for massive parallelism and claims near-linear scaling across hundreds of GPUs while matching the accuracy of leading CPU tools. The report does not publish benchmark numbers against named competitors.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project promised a production-ready tool, validation in existing chip design flows and a foundry, ISO certification and more patents. The report documents foundry validation, ISO 9001 and ecosystem integration. What it does not show is customers paying for the tool at scale: two pilots were still running at the end. CORDIS still lists the project as signed.

1. Production-ready engineDeliveredPer final report.
2. Foundry validationDeliveredProprietary process.
3. ISO certificationDeliveredISO 9001:2015.
4. Paying customersMinimalRON 235k turnover, 2025.

The Money

Amsimcel's turnover rose from RON 9,721 in 2022 to RON 235,084 in 2025, while it lost between RON 640,000 and RON 1.02 million a year. Its total income was much higher than its turnover, RON 4.8 million in 2024; the summary filings do not show where the rest came from. Its cash fell to RON 57,581 at the end of 2025, and its staff from eight to six.

What Cannot Be Checked

Why Europe Should Care

The report pitches HyperPV as a step towards European technological sovereignty in chip design tools, and the EIC backed a small Romanian team to build it. The technology passed its tests; the business has not yet found enough buyers to sustain itself.

The Verdict

Amsimcel and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.