Prem seeks $100M Series A as export bans boost sovereign AI demand

Swiss artificial intelligence startup Prem SA is raising $100 million in Series A funding at a valuation of at least $500 million, Bloomberg reported today. The round is expected to close in the third quarter.

Prem sells software for running AI models on a company’s own infrastructure, not a cloud provider’s. Customers fine-tune models, analyze documents and run inference in private environments and the data never goes back to Prem. That pitch is built for buyers who handle information they cannot hand to a third party. Its early targets are hedge funds and law firms.

The company dates to 2023. Its founder, Simone Giacomelli, had earlier helped start the decentralized AI network SingularityNET.

Prem is launching the fundraise alongside Fluso, an encrypted workspace for running AI agents and automating work. It runs where the customer’s data already sits, whether that is a private cloud, a virtual private cloud or an air-gapped on-premise system. Fluso uses open-weight models, so every parameter can be audited. None of the data touches a training pipeline, the company says.

Timing helps. On June 12, the U.S. ordered Anthropic PBC to block foreign access to its newest Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models and the company disabled them the next day, saying that was the only way to comply. The pattern showed up elsewhere too. JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut Claude access for staff in Hong Kong after deciding Anthropic’s licensing terms exclude Greater China and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. had done much the same earlier in June. For a regulated firm, that is the moment a model stops being a tool and starts being a dependency someone else controls.

Sovereign AI budgets were rising before any of that. Gartner Inc. has forecast roughly $80 billion in global sovereign cloud infrastructure-as-a-service spending this year. European spending alone is projected to more than triple, from $6.7 billion in 2025 to $23.1 billion in 2027.

Prem also sells Switzerland. The country has an EU adequacy decision, so data can move to and from the bloc even though Switzerland is not a member and a rewritten Swiss privacy law has applied since September 2023. That does not put a Swiss company beyond the reach of foreign governments. But for a buyer trying to cut its reliance on U.S. cloud providers, Swiss jurisdiction is at least something an auditor can sign off on.

Plenty of rivals want the same customers. Mistral AI SAS has leaned into European infrastructure, including $830 million in debt financing for a data center near Paris. Aleph Alpha GmbH built its name on sovereign deployments for governments. The hyperscalers are pitching their own locality-bound options, with Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. all in the mix.

The new funding isn’t Prem’s first raise. The company closed a $14 million seed round in April 2024, followed by a $6.1 million bridge at a $200 million valuation. Backers have included Fan Zhang, co-founder of Sequoia Capital China and David Maisel, founding chairman of Marvel Studios. Clear $500 million and the valuation is up roughly 2.5 times in about two years, with total funding pushing past $120 million.

Image: Prem