Optalysys, a computing company based in Leeds, has secured £23 million in a Series A extension round. The investment is intended to accelerate the commercialisation of its photonic chips and support the company’s expansion into the United States.
Dr Nick New, CEO and co-founder of Optalysys, commented: “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.”
The company was established in 2013 by Dr New and Robert Todd to focus on secure computing through the use of light to accelerate encrypted data technology. According to the firm, traditional electronic computing is nearing its physical limits due to the growth of AI and cloud workloads. They suggest that Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows data to be shared and analysed while remaining encrypted, but this process requires specific hardware acceleration to be effective.
Optalysys develops optical computing hardware designed to accelerate FHE beyond the capacity of electrical systems. The technology integrates data movement and processing on a single chip by combining silicon photonics with digital technologies. This method is intended to provide high computational power while lowering the energy consumption associated with current digital processes.
Robert Todd, CTO and co-founder of Optalysys, said: “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.”
The firm is currently working on a programmable layer for intensive workloads, such as GenAI and post-quantum algorithms. Its LightLocker Node servers, which launched last year, already employ early versions of this technology for encrypted blockchain applications.
Image source: Optalysys
