Verkko Robotics Launches VOLTAIC: A Cost and Energy Saving Spiking Neural Inference Model

London-based Verkko Robotics, a European DeepTech AI research lab, has introduced VOLTAIC, an artificial intelligence system designed to learn continuously over time, retain what it has learned, and operate with significantly less energy and computing power than today's leading multimodal models. If early performance claims hold, the technology could challenge the economics of the current frontier AI industry and help lay the foundation for AI sovereignty.

VOLTAIC is engineered for extreme energy efficiency, consuming 98% less energy than a traditional large language model. Its architecture enforces sparse networks, meaning most neurons and computational pathways remain inactive at any given moment, lowering power consumption and making it suitable for deployment on private hardware. In independent continual learning benchmarks, VOLTAIC achieved a catastrophic forgetting rate of just ~1.2% on Core50 and 77% accuracy on Split ImageNet-1K – 14 points above the previous record. Verkko's internal benchmarks place VOLTAIC's cost at 1/50th per query compared to leading LLMs. The system is currently in active development ahead of its Q4 2026 release.

Addressing the catastrophic forgetting problem, Giancarlo Cobino, Chief Scientist and co-founder with over 20 years of experience in neuroscience-inspired computing, stated: "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."

VOLTAIC is built on a completely different architecture: Hierarchical Synaptic Consolidation (HSC), a proprietary biologically inspired design that draws on how the human brain retains and consolidates memory. Unlike transformer models that forget, VOLTAIC remembers. The technology targets consumers and large enterprises, particularly in regulated sectors like finance, legal services, and aerospace, where continuous memory can deliver the greatest value.

Dr. Fabio Vallone, a physicist and researcher at the University of Pisa's Department of Excellence in Robotics & AI, commented: "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. This development has the potential to fundamentally reshape our relationship with intelligent machines."

By reducing dependency on massive cloud infrastructure and large US AI providers, VOLTAIC is positioned as a foundation for sovereign AI. As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently stated, dependence on foreign technologies for critical sectors is unacceptable. VOLTAIC aims to support European AI sovereignty by enabling local, energy-efficient AI deployment.