Lightmatter announces $155 million of additional investment
Lightmatter, a photonic computing company, has announced that it has raised a $155 million Series C-2 led by Google Ventures and Viking Global Investors, with participation from others. With this round, the company says it has raised over $420 million to date and is now valued at over $1.2 billion. The new financing will support the company in expediting growth to meet the increasing demand for high-performance computing (HPC) from AI innovators. Lightmatter plans to expand its team and office footprint, while accelerating its ability to provide customers increased performance on the most advanced AI workloads.
Lightmatter is developing photonic technologies that reconstruct how chips calculate and communicate, which can be leveraged by cloud providers, semiconductor companies, and enterprises for their computing needs. According to the company, its photonics-enabled hardware and software solutions simultaneously reduce power consumption and increase performance, which is essential for highly compute-intensive workloads like AI.
“Lightmatter is positioned to be a key driver in powering the next generation of computing systems that will further enable AI innovation,” said Lightmatter co-founder and CEO, Nick Harris. “Through photonic technologies, Lightmatter is ensuring the steady progress in computing performance continues, despite growing power consumption challenges and slowing progress with transistor scaling. We are thankful for the support of our investors, each of whom share our vision of Lightmatter playing an integral role in the future of computing. By increasing speed, lowering cost, and reducing environmental impact, our technologies can continue to push the limits of what’s possible, fuelling greater AI adoption and innovation.”
Erik Nordlander, general partner at Google Ventures, said: “In the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI, the demand for new compute and chip communication solutions is unprecedented. Lightmatter is harnessing the power of silicon photonics to meet this challenge, unlocking performance bottlenecks, increasing bandwidth, and allowing AI models to increase in size and scale.”
