Photonics Compute and Interconnect Startup Lightmatter Raises $154M Series C Funding, Targets HPC and AI Workloads
Summary
The company said it will leverage this new financing to arm some of the largest cloud providers, semiconductor companies and enterprises with photonic technology to bring a new level of performance and energy savings to the most advanced AI and HPC workloads.Rapid progress in artificial intelligence is forcing computing infrastructure to improve at an unprecedented rate. Generative AI and supercomputing will be transformed by photonic technologies in the coming years, and our investors, partners, and customers are aligned with Lightmatters mission of enabling the future of computing infrastructure with photonics.As generative AI systems proliferate across industries, the energy consumed and capital needed to run these algorithms is rising exponentially. The result is excessive heat loads, stagnant performance per watt and increasing operating costs.Large language models (LLMs) that power GenAI are both more lucrative and resource intensive than their predecessorsleaders in the space are now claiming they see power and cost limits to the size of these models.With this backdrop, Lightmatter is introducing its photonics-enabled products to the market: Envise, Passage and Idiom, providing a full stack of hardware and software solutions designed to realize the benefits of photonic compute and interconnect technologies. The new capital will be used to fund the delivery of these products to customers, according to the company.In 2022, the company announced growth with the recruitment of additions to its leadership team, including Richard Ho, who led Googles Tensor Processing Unit program, and Ritesh Jain, who led datacenter chip packaging at Intel, as VPs of Hardware Engineering. Lightmatter is taking a differentiated approach by using silicon photonics and bringing together a deeply technical team to further its mission, said Erik Nordlander, general partner at GV.