Arago raises $26 million for photonic AI chips
The start-up, which was founded less than a year ago, says its technology can power AI models from industry standard environments and is designed to deliver 10 times lower energy consumption compared with today’s leading GPUs
Arago, a Paris and Silicon Valley-based start-up focused on developin energy-efficient photonic AI chips, has announced it has raised $26 million in seed funding to accelerate the commercialisation of its photonic processor, codenamed “JEF”.
The surge in AI adoption has led to exponential – and unsustainable – growth in energy consumption. Arago’s mission is to radically rethink AI’s compute infrastructure so that the technology can have a viable future for everyone.
The heart of “JEF” is a proprietary photonic technology: instead of transistors, it uses lasers to process data with photons – which generate far less heat than electrons in conventional processors. By harnessing these inherent advantages, the chip aims to deliver 10 times lower energy consumption than today’s leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost.
According to Arago, early results demonstrate that “JEF” can run AI models from industry-standard software frameworks while staying fully compatible with the existing AI ecosystem, compute infrastructure, and manufacturing processes. The company says it also sidesteps the technical barriers that have historically limited the performance of photonic and GPU-alternative processors.
“To build a product that’s not only high-performing but also truly usable, it’s critical to deeply understand the constraints of integrating a component based on a different compute principle into the broader ecosystem,” said Nicolas Muller, Arago’s CEO and co-founder. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting for the ecosystem to adapt – our technology needs to be compatible with everything from manufacturing processes to the AI software stack from day one.”
Thong Le Hoang, co-founder of Visionaries Tomorrow, added: “Innovation in computing is one of the hardest deeptech challenges. Arago’s superpower lies in its first-principles vision of the future, combined with a deep understanding across digital, analogue, and photonic approaches. The result is a unique hybrid architecture built on the latest industry breakthroughs and engineered to deliver step-change performance gains in the near term.”
The oversubscribed $26 million seed round was co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow, with participation from Generative IQ and C4 Ventures, among others. The round also includes investment from prominent angel investors across the semiconductor, AI, and software industries, including Bertrand Serlet (former VP at Apple and co-founder of Fungible), Christophe Frey (GM at Arm), Olivier Pomel (co-founder of Datadog), Thomas Wolf (co-founder of Hugging Face), and Jack Abraham (co-founder of Exowatt), among others.
Arago plans to use the funding to accelerate product development toward commercialisation, grow its team across France, North America, and Israel, and deepen business partnerships to scale its growth.
