Lightmatter illuminates $11m series A

Lightmatter, a US-based artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker spun out from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) raised $11m in a series A round yesterday co-led by Matrix Partners and Spark Capital.

Founded in 2017, Lightmatter has developed a silicon chip that uses light signals instead of electrical signals to process data, offering orders of magnitude performance improvements. The technology is particularly relevant for AI applications, which require vast amounts of computing power.

The company is based on work conducted by Nicholas Harris, Darius Bunandar and Thomas Graham.

Harris co-authored a research paper into the technology with Yichen Shen and nine others in Nature Photonics in June 2017. Harris and Shen later parted ways for unspecified reasons, with Shen raising $10m for his spinout, which works on similar technology, last Friday.

Stan Reiss, general partner at Matrix Partners, and Santo Politi, co-founder and general partner of Spark Capital, have joined the board of directors.

Harris said: “For decades, electronic computers have been at the foundation of the computational progress that has ultimately enabled the AI revolution, but AI algorithms have a voracious appetite for computational power.

“AI is really in its infancy, and to move forward, new enabling technologies are required. At Lightmatter, we are augmenting electronic computers with photonics to power a fundamentally new kind of computer that is efficient enough to propel the next generation of AI.”