A €17M ledger carries Kalray's €81M AI-chip comeback

A profit that sold off

Kalray returned to profit on 24 September↗: €0.8M of net income against a €2.1M loss a year earlier, on revenue of €8.5M, up 58% like-for-like ¹. Against the year-earlier consolidated figure, before the Enterprise business was sold in February 2025, growth was 7.7% ¹. The market's answer came Monday: a 12.7% drop to €4.365 as the print landed ²³. The stock is still up 270% this year, off a 2026 high of €16.00 ².

The profit is a tax credit, again

The €5.1M of EBITDA rests on a cost base that halved for a temporary reason: staff seconded to Openchip, home again since July ¹. Below the EBITDA line, operations still lost €1.4M; a €1.5M research tax credit and €0.6M of extraordinary income carried the profit, the decomposition The Inference reported on 27 September when the shares traded at €5.00 ¹.

Two cheques, and one payer is a shareholder

The licence model has two named payers. Bull, the €720M-revenue European supercomputing brand, signed in late July for Kalray's Networking Engine: about €12M of potential revenue over 18 months plus royalties, €2.2M of it already booked, with Bull's components launching from 2028 ¹⁴.

The Openchip extension, about €5M over 12 months, is still "under discussion" ¹. Openchip, the Barcelona-based RISC-V accelerator developer, became a Kalray shareholder weeks before these results and days after the Bull announcement. It paid the exercise price on warrants issued with the 2025 strategic accord on 31 July, their final day, and 2,881,577 new shares↗, about 15% of the company on a diluted basis, followed on 3 August ⁵⁶⁷.

Monday's French trade writeup↗ swapped the two cheques, crediting Openchip with the €12M and Bull with the €5M, the reverse of Kalray's own numbers ⁸¹.

Two invoices against an €81M market value

That is the whole model: two invoices, one tax credit, and royalties that begin when Bull's components sell, from 2028 ¹⁴. The €17M of potential sits against an €81M market value, €2.2M of cash at 30 June, and the lone analyst's €1.50 target↗, two-thirds below the price ¹²⁹. The FactSet estimate panel still has Kalray losing money for the full year, at −€0.25 of 2026 earnings per share ².

Three tests for the second half

Management confirmed double-digit growth and better EBITDA, and cash generation genuinely improved, to €4.6M from operations ¹. The Bull agreement↗ was signed at the start of H2, too late for the June cash figure, and Openchip's warrant payment came after the snapshot too ¹⁵. The tests are concrete: sign the Openchip €5M, hold costs with the seconded staff back on payroll, and land a third payer. Until one happens, a stock down 45% in three months is priced off two cheques ².