Neurophos raises $110m to push photonic AI chips into data centers
Neurophos has raised $110 million in an oversubscribed Series A round to commercialise its photonic AI chips for data centre inference workloads.
The Austin, Texas-based startup says the funding brings its total capital to $118 million and will support the delivery of its first integrated photonic compute systems.
The round was led by Gates Frontier, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Bosch Ventures, Aramco Ventures, Carbon Direct Capital and others, highlighting growing industry interest in alternatives to power-hungry GPUs.
Neurophos’ platform is based on an optical processing unit that integrates more than one million micron-scale optical processing elements on a single chip, enabled by metamaterial optical modulators.
The company claims the approach delivers up to 100× improvements in performance and energy efficiency compared with conventional AI accelerators, while remaining compatible with existing data centre architectures.
The new funding will be used to scale engineering, complete the software stack and support early customer deployments as data centre operators face increasing power, cooling and compute constraints.
