London, June 18, 2026 – Verkko Robotics, a leading deep tech European AI Research Lab, has unveiled VOLTAIC, a groundbreaking spiking neural inference engine. This new technology is designed to continuously learn, resist catastrophic forgetting, and operate at a fraction of the cost and energy consumption of current multi-modal models. The release of VOLTAIC has the potential to revolutionize the economics of the AI industry and provide a foundation for true AI sovereignty.
VOLTAIC’s debut comes at a critical time as the resource demands and reliance on external US-based AI providers have come under intense scrutiny. With a focus on extreme energy efficiency, VOLTAIC’s architecture utilizes sparse networks, resulting in significantly lower power consumption. This makes it highly suitable for deployment on private hardware.
In independent continual learning benchmarks, VOLTAIC achieved a catastrophic forgetting rate of only ~1.2% on Core50 and an impressive 77% accuracy on Split ImageNet-1K. These results, which are 14 points higher than the previous record set by other systems, solidify VOLTAIC’s position at the forefront of its class. Additionally, VOLTAIC delivers these results while consuming only a fraction of the energy cost of conventional transformer-based systems.
Giancarlo Cobino, Verkko’s Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, is the mastermind behind VOLTAIC. With over 20 years of experience at the intersection of neuroscience-inspired computing and enterprise AI, Cobino has developed an architecture that continuously learns in real time and resists catastrophic forgetting. He explains, “By shifting from dense, brute-force computation to sparse, adaptive threshold dynamics, we have built an architecture that learns continuously in real time and resists catastrophic forgetting. This efficiency allows the system to adapt to personal behaviour and individual user habits locally, without massive power demands.”
Dr. Fabio Vallone, a highly respected researcher at the University of Pisa and the Department of Excellence in Robotics & AI at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, praised VOLTAIC’s launch, stating, “Voltaic represents a significant breakthrough in continual learning by directly addressing the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, ushering in a paradigm shift in how we train adaptive systems. By introducing novel methodologies, the Verkko Robotics team is unlocking previously unexplored avenues for practical applications and redefining human-AI interaction. This development has the potential to fundamentally reshape our relationship with intelligent machines, and its long-term implications are incredibly promising.”
The issue of sovereignty is a growing concern in Europe, as queries sent to most US-based AI providers involve a transfer of data outside EEA jurisdiction. The European Commission recently unveiled its European Technological Sovereignty Package, with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stating, “We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure.” By reducing dependency on massive cloud infrastructure, VOLTAIC is designed as a foundation for sovereign AI.
Unlike the prevailing approach to AI, which relies on transformer architecture and requires billions of dollars to build new-generation models, VOLTAIC is built on a proprietary biologically inspired design called Hierarchical Synaptic Consolidation (HSC). This unique architecture draws inspiration from how the human brain retains and consolidates memory. As a result, VOLTAIC retains prior knowledge as it learns, allowing knowledge to compound rather than degrade. While conventional transformer models often forget previous knowledge, VOLTAIC remembers and builds upon it.
VOLTAIC is being developed for both consumers and large organizations, particularly in regulated sectors such as finance, legal, and aerospace. In these complex environments, where institutional knowledge is often lost across departments and queries are sent to external AI providers, VOLTAIC’s continuous memory is designed to provide the most value. Unlike traditional models that require retraining to incorporate new knowledge, VOLTAIC learns in real time, allowing institutional intelligence to compound rather than be discarded.
Verkko Robotics co-founder and CEO, Stephen McCreath, explains, “The AI industry has been trapped in an arms race of bigger models. With VOLTAIC, we aim to break that paradigm. As a consequence of what we are doing, in the future, we will be less reliant on large data centers. This is an incredibly exciting time for both Verkko Robotics Ltd and the field of artificial intelligence as we move towards continuous learning.”
