Optalysys secures £23M to scale photonic computing
UK-based Optalysys has secured £23 million in Series A extension funding to accelerate the commercial deployment of its photonic processors and support expansion into the United States.
The round was led by Northern Gritstone, with backing from imec.xpand, Lingotto Horizon, and the UK government’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF).
Optalysys’ technology combines data movement and computation on a single photonic chip, integrating silicon photonics with digital processing.
This approach is aimed at overcoming the performance and energy limitations of traditional electronic computing, particularly for AI workloads, cloud infrastructure, and secure applications using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).
Early implementations of this technology were featured in the company’s LightLocker Node servers for encrypted blockchain processing.
The funding will support scaling production, entering the US photonics ecosystem, and accelerating efforts to make photonic computing a standard component of next-generation cloud infrastructure.
CEO Dr Nick New emphasised that photonic computing opens “fundamentally new capabilities” for moving and processing data with greater speed and efficiency, while CTO Robert Todd highlighted photonics’ growing role in addressing the power and performance limits of electronic processors.
This investment signals the increasing commercial traction of photonic integrated circuits beyond traditional communications, positioning them as key enablers for high-density, energy-efficient computing architectures.
