Leeds-based photonic computing company Optalysys today announced that it has raised €26.4 million (£23 million) in a Series A extension round to accelerate the commercialisation of its proprietary photonic chips and support US expansion.
The round was led by Northern Gritstone, with participation from imec.xpand, Lingotto Horizon, and the UK government’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF).
“We are at a defining moment in the evolution of computing. Photonic computing opens up fundamentally new capabilities, allowing data to be moved and processed with far greater speed and efficiency. This investment validates both the scale of the opportunity ahead and our ability to execute against it. It allows us to expand into new markets and take an important step towards making photonic computing a mainstream part of cloud infrastructure,” said Dr Nick New, CEO and co-founder of Optalysys.
Founded in 2013 by Dr New (CEO) and Robert Todd (CTO), Optalysys focuses on enabling secure computing. It claims to harness the power of light to accelerate always-encrypted data technology.
The company claims that conventional electronic computing is reaching its physical limits with the exponential growth of AI and cloud workloads. According to Optalysys, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables data to be securely shared and analysed whilst remaining encrypted.
But FHE requires acceleration to be effective, and current electronic computing is approaching its performance limit, claims the startup.
This is where Optalysys comes into play. Through optical computing, it develops hardware that accelerates FHE beyond the capabilities of electrical computing. Its approach integrates data movement and processing on a single chip, combining silicon photonics with digital technologies to deliver high computational power while reducing the carbon footprint of today’s energy-intensive digital methods.
The company is developing a programmable, high-density layer designed to run compute-intensive workloads, including GenAI and post-quantum algorithms.
“Recent acquisitions in the semiconductor industry have highlighted the role that photonics can play in addressing the limits of electronic computing, particularly in processing capability and power consumption, resulting from the demands of training and running even larger AI models. Optalysys’ approach uniquely combines data movement and compute within the same package. Expanding to the US is an exciting and natural next step for us, so that we can tap into its strong photonics ecosystem and the immense talent located in Silicon Valley,” said Robert Todd, CTO and co-founder of Optalysys.
Early forms of FHE technology are being used in digital form in Optalysys’ LightLocker™ Node servers, launched last year, which the company describes as the world’s first dedicated hardware solution designed for encrypted blockchain applications.
