Esslingen-based deep-tech startup ExpectedIT is developing LPool, chip-level interconnect IP designed to pool CPU, memory and storage across datacenter racks. The company, led by new CEO Klas Moreau and IBM veteran co-founder Burkhard Steinmacher-Burow, is preparing a Series A round to advance the technology toward production, as shown on IT Press Tour.
Esslingen am Neckar-based German start-up ExpectedIT is developing chip-level interconnect technology designed to address one of the central constraints in modern artificial intelligence infrastructure: the movement of data between processors, memory and storage within datacenter racks.
The German deep-tech company’s core product, called LPool, is licensable intellectual property that creates what the company describes as a hardware-coherent memory domain spanning an entire rack of CPUs. Rather than treating each server as an isolated unit connected by conventional networking, LPool is intended to let operators pool compute, memory, storage and network bandwidth across multiple servers as a single resource.
According to the company, the approach targets a bottleneck that has become more acute as AI workloads scale: inefficient data movement between components, which drives up hardware costs, leaves GPU capacity underutilized and strains constrained resources such as memory. ExpectedIT says its architecture optimizes performance at the datacenter level rather than within individual servers, and that this can raise GPU utilization and reduce infrastructure overhead.
The company cites internal figures for the technology’s potential impact, including job completion up to ten times faster, hardware and energy costs reduced by up to 50 percent, and AI inference performance per watt up to nine times higher than conventional GPU server architectures. ExpectedIT also points to potential CO2 reductions of up to 50 percent and says the approach could translate into multi-billion-dollar savings potential at datacenter scale. These figures are company estimates and have not been independently verified.
ExpectedIT positions LPool as compatible with existing hardware components, saying the technology does not require proprietary lock-in and can be integrated into infrastructure operators already run.
Leadership and origins
The company’s technical roots trace to IBM, where members of the founding team worked on the interconnection fabric for the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer and on POWER8 CAPI, a coherent accelerator interface. ExpectedIT says its team holds more than 100 patents related to interconnect technology.
Burkhard Steinmacher-Burow, a co-founder of the company, served as CEO from July 2021 before moving into the role of Chief Product Officer in April 2026. Before co-founding ExpectedIT, he spent more than two decades at IBM, including as a Senior Technical Staff Member working on workload software and server hardware, and earlier as a Research Staff Member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, where he worked on the Blue Gene series of supercomputers.
Klas Moreau joined ExpectedIT as CEO in April 2026. According to the company, he brings more than 25 years of senior leadership experience at international deep-tech companies and previously served as CEO of Swedish chip company ZeroPoint Technologies.
Funding and roadmap
ExpectedIT has completed a seed financing round and is preparing a Series A round. According to the company, the round is intended to raise around 20 million euros, with a close targeted for October 2026, though timelines for early-stage financing rounds frequently shift.
The company is supported by the European Union through the European Innovation Council, having been selected, it says, through a competitive process. It also names Vinton Cerf, widely credited as a co-designer of the internet’s core protocols, as an advisor.
ExpectedIT currently employs around 20 people, most of them engineers based in the Stuttgart region, and says it plans to double headcount. The company has set an internal target of a first-generation LPool chip by late 2027, with production planned to follow in 2028.
On the commercial side, ExpectedIT says it is in discussions with chip vendors including Intel, AMD and Arm, as well as hardware partners such as Samsung and Dell, and has held early talks with hyperscale operators including Microsoft and Meta. The company said Intel recently granted it access to use an interface relevant to the technology. It also named UK-based Fractal Rain as a partner. None of the companies named have publicly confirmed a partnership with ExpectedIT.
Technical rationale
ExpectedIT argues that established interconnect approaches, including Ethernet and PCIe, are not sufficient on their own for the scale of data movement required by large AI workloads. The company describes PCIe as a useful but limited layer and says LPool is designed to remove effective boundaries between servers within a rack, rather than optimizing the connections between them. In the company’s framing, this allows CPUs, memory and storage that would otherwise sit idle in separate servers to be treated as a shared pool.
The company links this design to what it describes as a shift in AI workloads, from chat-based applications toward autonomous agents and, more recently, toward inference-time learning, in which models continue to learn from interactions using large replay buffers. ExpectedIT says workloads of this kind are increasingly memory- and CPU-bound rather than limited primarily by GPU compute, which it argues strengthens the case for rack-scale resource pooling.
Moreau, who joined the company from ZeroPoint Technologies, said in a statement that he joined ExpectedIT to help move the technology from an early-stage breakthrough toward broader industry adoption, citing the combination of timing, technology and team as central to that goal.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de