Semiconductor startup Tendrils has completed a $30 million seed round financing, led by Benchmark

According to EU-Startups, Cambridge semiconductor startup Tendrils has completed a $30 million seed round financing, approximately €26 million, led by Benchmark, with participation from Visionaries Club, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, FR8, Antimatter, Cloudberry VC, Conviction, Embassy Ventures, and SV Angels, along with several angel investors.

The company was founded in 2025 by CEO Nils Cremer and co-founders T6 and Hugo McNally, and is developing a universal processor architecture that allows thousands of cores to work in parallel.

The new architecture is based on an interactive network computing model, representing programs as interconnected nodes, allowing independent operations to be executed simultaneously, attempting to break free from traditional shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. The company is also developing an open-source programming language called Vine, which has a syntax similar to Rust, making it easier for software to adapt to this parallel-first architecture. Tendrils stated that while GPUs have taken on large-scale numerical computations, AI agents still heavily rely on CPUs for irregular tasks such as executing code and retrieving documents. Jack Altman, general partner at Benchmark and co-founder of Lattice, will join the board.