Finnish startup Flow Computing has emerged from stealth mode, having raised €4 million ($4.3m) in pre-seed funding.

The round was led by Nordic venture capitalist firm Butterfly Ventures, with participation from FOV Ventures, Superhero Capital, and Business Finland.

Founded as a spinout from VTT Technical Research Center of Finland – a Finnish state-backed research lab – Flow Computing has been developing parallel computing solutions that can be added to any CPU design architecture to increase its compute performance. Flow claims that it has optimized licenses for every major tier of CPU market application: mobile, PC, and supercomputer.

Called a Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), the company claims the technology works by moving tasks into and out of the processor at speeds faster than has previously been possible. This is achieved by the PPU performing nanosecond-scale traffic management on-chip, with the more PPU cores integrated on-die, the higher the performance boost that will be subsequently gained.

The company says its PPU can improve CPU performance 100x, bringing about what it calls “an era of SuperCPUs.” The company says its solutions have been designed for full backward compatibility, with ancillary components, such as matrix units, vector units, NPUs, and GPUs, also benefiting from performance enhancements offered by the PPU.

All of this is done without the need to modify any code on any CPU or architecture.

“We firmly believe there have been only incremental improvements in CPU performance during the last few decades – in our opinion, this has led to a situation where the CPU has actually become the weakest link in computing due to its sub-optimal sequential architecture,” said Timo Valtonen, co-founder and CEO of Flow Computing.

“A new era in CPU performance has become a necessity in order to meet the continuously increasing demand for more computing performance, driven to large extent by needs in AI, as well as Edge and cloud computing,” he said.