Lightmatter’s photonic technologies will be the foundation for AI and high-performance computing

Fidelity Management & Research Company, SIP, Viking Global Investors, GV (Google Ventures) and others join Lightmatter Series C round—tripling the company’s valuation

Lightmatter, the leader in photonics, announced today that it raised a $154 million Series C investment round from SIP Global, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Viking Global Investors, GV (Google Ventures), HPE Pathfinder and existing investors. With this round, Lightmatter has raised a total of over $270 million to date. The company will leverage this new financing to arm some of the largest cloud providers, semiconductor companies, and enterprises with the power of 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. The energy costs of this growth are significant, even on a planetary scale,” said Lightmatter co-founder and CEO, Nick Harris. “Generative AI and supercomputing will be transformed by photonic technologies in the coming years, and our investors, partners, and customers are aligned with Lightmatter’s mission of enabling the future of computing infrastructure with photonics.”

The Generative AI Boom and Computational Impact

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 Generative AI are both more lucrative and resource intensive than their predecessors—leaders in the space are now claiming they see power and cost limits to the size of these models. Under 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 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.

“Lightmatter’s unique approach to harnessing the power of photonics in hardware trips will further the initial capabilities and use cases that we’re seeing from generative AI,” said Jeffrey Smith, General Partner at SIP Global Partners. “These technologies and its global customers will need the highest compute power to run these algorithms and apply them to new verticals, and we’re thrilled to invest in Lightmatter who can make that potential with computing that is faster and more sustainable.”

“Photonic technology has the potential to meet the demand of today’s artificial intelligence compute workloads. 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. “We’re thrilled to continue supporting Lightmatter’s next stage of growth as they build the leading silicon photonics company.”

In 2022, the company announced significant growth with the recruitment of top talent to its leadership team, including Richard Ho, who led Google’s Tensor Processing Unit program, and Ritesh Jain, who led datacenter chip packaging at Intel, as VPs of Hardware Engineering. Lightmatter also announced Jessie Zhang, who led corporate financial planning at Apple, as VP of Finance, and Steve Klinger, former VP at Innovium, as VP of Product. Lightmatter currently has over 20 active roles across product, R&D, and engineering, and holds over 150 patents worldwide.

About Lightmatter

Lightmatter is delivering a new paradigm in semiconductor chip architecture and the next transition for large-scale computing. The company has developed photonic processors that are faster, more efficient and cooler than any conventional processors in existence today and is answering the call for increased compute speed, low energy density, and reduced chip heating. Lightmatter is set to enable the continued rapid growth of artificial intelligence computing while minimizing its well-known and growing impact on the environment.

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