Swiss semiconductor startup Mosaic SoC raises €3.2 million to bring spatial intelligence to low-power devices

Mosaic SoC, a Swiss semiconductor startup building dedicated perception chips that bring spatial intelligence to energy-constrained devices, has announced a €3.2 million ($3.8 million) pre-Seed round.

The round was led by Founderful with participation from Kick Foundation. Last year, the company secured €162.4k (CHF 150k) from Venture Kick.

“Spatial intelligence shouldn’t require an application-class processor and a GPU. We built Mosaic SoC to deliver real-time perception at a fraction of the energy, so battery-powered devices can understand their environment without compromising form factor,” said Alfio Di Mauro, CEO and co-founder of Mosaic SoC.

Founded in 2024 by Moritz Scherer and Alfio Di Mauro, Mosaic SoC is building perception chips that help devices see and understand their environment in real time at minimal power. The company is developing integrated circuits designed for spatial awareness in wearables and mobile devices, including AR glasses and smartphone cameras.

According to the company, spatially aware AR glasses, always-on computer vision, and persistent AI features all depend on something most hardware still can’t deliver: real-time perception on a minimal power budget.

Today, these capabilities are mostly limited to systems with power-hungry application processors and GPUs, making truly wearable form factors unfeasible. For Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) building next-generation AR and mobile hardware, adding more compute often means adding more complexity.

Mosaic SoC claims to address this with its dedicated perception chips that bring spatial intelligence to energy-constrained devices.  Its perception chip provides a baseline layer of spatial intelligence, with a full application layer that ODMs can integrate and build on top of.

The company develops integrated circuits that analyse visual and positional sensor data, enabling devices to understand their location and surroundings in real-time. The company describes it as turning space into signals. Mosaic SoC states that its chips are designed to be small enough and efficient enough to make smart glasses indistinguishable from regular glasses, while still delivering full spatial awareness. 

The company explains that its chip enables a device to build a local map of its surroundings and the objects within them, supporting features such as recalling where an item was last seen or generating a floor plan on the fly. 

In smartphones, Mosaic SoC serves as a co-processor for the front camera, enabling always-on tracking and classification with minimal power consumption. This allows the device to start recording only when a specific event or object is detected, providing constant awareness without significantly draining the battery.

The business model is straightforward: the company sells integrated circuits. “But what makes Mosaic SoC unusual is that adding its chip doesn’t add complexity for ODMs. It removes it. The chip ships with a full application layer that Mosaic SoC develops and maintains, so ODMs can integrate it and build on top of it rather than engineering perception capabilities from scratch. The ambition is to bring spatial intelligence to every device where it was previously impractical,” mentions the company. 

Mosaic SoC notes that its core differentiation is architectural. Where competing approaches rely on single- or dual-core ARM-based designs, Mosaic SoC uses a proprietary multi-core architecture with eight or more cores, engineered to maximise performance per watt and make always-on perception viable in energy-constrained devices. 

But the company sees hardware as just the starting point. It is also building AI deployment toolchains and compilers that let firmware developers fully leverage the architecture. It plans to evolve from a chip provider into a platform supplier where applications are developed, deployed, and optimised around its silicon.

Mosaic SoC reported that in its first year, it has already generated meaningful revenue from NRE contracts with ODM partners. As its chips reach the market, the company expects its revenue profile to shift from engineering engagements toward scalable product revenues tied to chip sales. 

The post Swiss semiconductor startup Mosaic SoC raises €3.2 million to bring spatial intelligence to low-power devices appeared first on EU-Startups.