Milan-based Domyn has secured over $1 billion in total financing, yet only ten percent of that figure represents equity, a structure that reveals more about its strategy than the headline number itself.
The company pulled in roughly $1.1 billion, with debt accounting for approximately 90 percent of the total, according to Sifted. That split signals something specific: this money buys hardware, not research talent.
Mistral pursued a similar path on a smaller scale, borrowing $830 million from seven banks to fund a data center outside Paris. European AI firms have realized that lenders will finance GPU-filled facilities on terms venture capitalists would never offer for model development.
What Domyn is building is Colosseum, a supercomputer in southern Italy assembled with Nvidia and Vertiv. The system runs 80 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 units, nearly 6,000 Grace Blackwell chips, drawing around 7MW and rated at 115 exaflops. Domyn describes it as purpose-built for models exceeding a trillion parameters.
Founded in Milan in 2016 as iGenius by Uljan Sharka, who remains at the helm, the company rebranded to Domyn last year. It targets banks, insurers, pharmaceutical firms, defense contractors, and governments, betting that these buyers prefer owning models over renting access to someone else’s.
Customers get the codebase and can pre-train on their own data. The models go to market through Microsoft’s Foundry platform. Domyn has released two models so far, including a mission-critical system benchmarked against GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Those comparisons come from the company itself.
Sharka has set aggressive targets: $10 billion in investment over three years and €1 billion in revenue within the same period. Current recurring revenue sits in the tens of millions.
The raise lands amid a European AI infrastructure push that has produced more announcements than actual delivery. Brussels opened bidding on seven AI gigafactories under a €30 billion program, though delays have since frustrated partners. Italy has moved independently with a €1 billion national AI fund.
Domyn stands as the most visible private beneficiary of that positioning. The company has worked with Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s G42 on the Italian supercomputer project.
Key details remain undisclosed: investor names, valuation, lender identities, and debt terms. Domyn has issued no announcement of its own. That silence matters because the repayment schedule would reveal what the company believes demand actually looks like. This round, raised against a machine rather than a market, surpasses the company’s entire prior fundraising history.
