ZeroPoint Took EIC Accelerator Money to Compress Memory, Then AI

Every server in a data centre carries memory chips that are partly filled with data that could be stored in less space. ZeroPoint Technologies, a spin-out of Professor Per Stenström's computer architecture group at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, designs circuit blocks that compress and decompress that data in hardware, fast enough that the processor does not notice. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 9 January 2019, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected its MaxiMem project, listed under "Goteborg" in the Commission's list of Phase 2 winners. ZeroPoint is the only company named for the project.

The grant was €971,223.75 towards a €1,387,462.50 project that ran from 1 May 2019 to 31 October 2021, according to CORDIS. The proposal promised "doubling memory capacity, bandwidth, speed and performance" and said server makers "could save up to 50% of memory costs and 25% of total hardware costs". It also forecast an EBITDA of €23.6 million in the fourth year of sales. Seven years after selection, the company is still operating and still unprofitable, and it now sells the same idea to builders of AI chips.

Where ZeroPoint Stands Now

ZeroPoint is active and has been busy with announcements in 2026. On 21 January it named Brett Cline, an executive from semiconductor IP and chip design software, as chief executive, according to a company release. In May it replaced its board chair, Anders Brännström, with Christer Simrén, who has held chief executive and senior roles at companies including Korsnäs and Billerud, according to a second release. Cline called it "this critical period in ZeroPoint's journey". The Swedish register, as shown by Ratsit, confirms Simrén as chair, still lists co-founder Angelos Arelakis as the registered managing director and Cline as an external signatory, and records new articles of association dated 12 February 2026. What changed in those articles is not visible in the free register data.

On 15 July 2026 the company launched ZeroStream, a block that compresses data moving over memory and streaming interfaces. It claims "20-35% effective bandwidth improvement" and up to 1.5 times compression on the weights of large language models. The same release regrouped its catalogue into four product lines, ZeroStream, ZeroConnect, ZeroStorage and ZeroAI, which the company website now lists. The website names no customers.

The Technology: Compression Inside the Memory Controller

Data compression is old; doing it on main memory is hard. Software compressors such as zstd or LZ4 take microseconds, far too slow for memory a processor reads billions of times a second. ZeroPoint's approach, described in its Phase 1 report on CORDIS, is an IP block, a licensed piece of chip design, placed next to the processor's memory controller that compresses and decompresses on the fly. The company says its engines run at "low nanosecond latencies" and "more than 1000 times faster" than traditional algorithms, according to its February 2025 release. These are the company's own figures; no independent benchmark of a ZeroPoint block in a shipping chip could be found.

The business model is the one used by Arm or Codasip: ZeroPoint does not make chips, it sells designs to companies that do. That means its success is invisible until a licensee ships silicon and says so. The €50,000 Phase 1 study of 2017 had started with smartphones and concluded: "We have as a consequence of the results from the project decided to change target application from mobile/tablets to servers." MaxiMem was the result of that change.

What MaxiMem Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

MaxiMem did not fund the compression engine itself, which existed before the grant. It paid for sales tools. Chip buyers want to know how an IP block will behave in their own design before they license it, and building a demonstration chip is expensive. The project was to build three families of software, for compression analysis, memory management emulation and architecture simulation, and to use them with at least three prospective customers, according to the final report on CORDIS.

That report, written by the company, says all three tool families were "fully developed, integrated and quality tested with several customers", that more than three demonstrations were completed, and that "Commercial agreements signed with 2 customers", one for servers and one for smart devices. It also says 22 patent applications were filed and 12 patents granted during the project. The project ended on schedule on 31 October 2021. Public announcements back part of the commercial claim: in February 2022 ZeroPoint announced its first Memory Booster licence for its Ziptilion block to an unnamed "global semiconductor developer", reported by Design & Reuse, and in April 2024 it licensed its DenseMem block for CXL memory to an unnamed "major global semiconductor manufacturer", according to eeNews Europe.

1. Three families of simulation and analysis toolsDeliveredReported complete in the CORDIS final report; company statement only.
2. Demonstrations to at least three customersDeliveredMore than three, per the same report; customers not named.
3. First licence contractsDeliveredLicences announced in February 2022 and April 2024, both to unnamed licensees.
4. Compression inside servers on the marketUnverifiedNo licensee has announced a product containing ZeroPoint IP.
5. EBITDA of €23.6M in year four of salesNot achievedNet loss of SEK 23.3M in 2025.

The project delivered what it was funded to build, on time. The larger promises in the proposal, halving data centre memory energy and a business earning tens of millions of euros a year, rest on licensees shipping chips at volume, and no public evidence of that exists.

What ZeroPoint Has Achieved Since the Award

Private money arrived as the project closed. In October 2021 ZeroPoint raised €2.5 million from Industrifonden and existing shareholders, reported by eeNews Europe and Design & Reuse. The CORDIS report credits MaxiMem's "investor-ready business plan" for that round. In February 2023 it added €3.2 million from Climentum Capital, Industrifonden, Chalmers Ventures and existing owners, according to tech.eu and Industrifonden. In May 2024 a €5.0 million Series A followed, led by Matterwave Ventures, according to the company and BeBeez. Equity rose from SEK 45.9 million to SEK 80.0 million in 2024 despite a SEK 19.5 million loss, which implies about SEK 53.7 million of new capital, consistent in size with that round.

CB Insights lists a further "Series A - II" of $1.6 million in May 2025. The register data does not show it as equity: ZeroPoint's equity fell from SEK 80.0 million to SEK 56.7 million in 2025, exactly the year's loss. Whether that money came as a loan or convertible, or did not arrive, could not be verified.

Products multiplied. ZeroPoint launched hardware engines for the zstd and LZ4 compression formats and won a Best of Show award at the FMS 2024 memory conference for its DenseMem CXL controller, according to its September 2024 release. In February 2025 it announced AI-MX, which it said would be "delivered to initial customers and partners in the second half of 2025". No delivery was announced, and AI-MX does not appear in the July 2026 catalogue under that name. In April 2025 it announced an alliance with Rebellions, a South Korean AI chip company, and in October 2025 a demonstration with Seagate at the OCP Global Summit, both listed in its Cision newsroom. Neither is described as a licence.

The Money

The Swedish accounts, shown by Ratsit and Hitta, show income ("omsättning") rising from SEK 16.9 million in 2021 to SEK 29.4 million in 2024 and falling to SEK 25.4 million in 2025, while the net loss grew every year, from SEK 5.3 million to SEK 23.3 million. The two sites agree on these figures but not on what they mean. Hitta computes a profit margin of -88% for 2025 on the full SEK 25.4 million. Ratsit gives -106,314%, which implies that only a tiny part of the income was net sales. The free register data does not split income into sales and other items such as capitalised development, and the annual report that would settle it was not read for this article.

The balance sheet changed sharply in 2025. Fixed assets grew from SEK 52.6 million in 2023 to SEK 88.3 million in 2025; what they consist of is not shown in the register summaries. Current assets fell from SEK 22.6 million to SEK 2.5 million in one year, and short-term liabilities rose from SEK 10.3 million to SEK 32.7 million. Both registers put the quick ratio at 7.6% at the end of 2025.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Chips Act aims to strengthen Europe's capacity to design and produce chips, and ZeroPoint is a European owner of processor memory IP. ZeroPoint has also worked inside two EU computing programmes: it received €842,500 as a partner in EuroEXA, an exascale supercomputing project that ran from 2017 to 2021, and €502,500 in Vitamin-V, a 2023 to 2025 project to build a RISC-V software stack for cloud services, according to CORDIS.

Data centre energy is the other link. Operators of data centres with an IT power demand of at least 500 kW in the EU must report their energy use to a common database under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364 of March 2024. A technology that lets servers do the same work with less memory fits that agenda. Whether ZeroPoint's technology does so in practice depends on chips that are not yet public.

The Verdict

ZeroPoint Technologies has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.