Lightmatter – a leader in photonics – announced recently that it raised a $154 million Series C investment round from SIP Global, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Viking Global Investors, GV (Google Ventures), HPE Pathfinder and existing investors. With this funding round, Lightmatter has raised a total of over $270 million to date. The company will utilize this new financing to arm some of the largest cloud providers, semiconductor companies, and enterprises with the power of photonic technology to bring a new level of performance and energy savings to the most advanced AI and HPC workloads.
As generative AI systems proliferate across a wide variety of industries, the energy consumed and capital needed to run these algorithms is rising exponentially. And the result is excessive heat loads, stagnant performance per watt, and increasing operating costs.
Large language models (LLMs) that power Generative AI are considered both more lucrative and resource intensive than their predecessors and leaders in the space are now claiming they see power and cost limits to the size of these models. Considering this backdrop, Lightmatter is introducing its photonics-enabled products to the market: Envise, Passage, and Idiom, providing a full stack of hardware and software solutions to realize the benefits of photonic compute and interconnect technologies. The new funding round will be used to fund the delivery of these products to customers.
Last year, the company announced significant growth with the recruitment of top talent to its leadership team including Richard Ho, who led Google’s Tensor Processing Unit program, and Ritesh Jain, who led datacenter chip packaging at Intel, as VPs of Hardware Engineering. And Lightmatter also announced Jessie Zhang, who led corporate financial planning at Apple, as VP of Finance, and Steve Klinger, former VP at Innovium, as VP of Product.
KEY QUOTES:
“Rapid progress in artificial intelligence is forcing computing infrastructure to improve at an unprecedented rate. The energy costs of this growth are significant, even on a planetary scale. Generative AI and supercomputing will be transformed by photonic technologies in the coming years, and our investors, partners, and customers are aligned with Lightmatter’s mission of enabling the future of computing infrastructure with photonics.”
— Lightmatter co-founder and CEO, Nick Harris
“Lightmatter’s unique approach to harnessing the power of photonics in hardware trips will further the initial capabilities and use cases that we’re seeing from generative AI. These technologies and its global customers will need the highest compute power to run these algorithms and apply them to new verticals, and we’re thrilled to invest in Lightmatter who can make that potential with computing that is faster and more sustainable.”
— Jeffrey Smith, General Partner at SIP Global Partners
“Photonic technology has the potential to meet the demand of today’s artificial intelligence compute workloads. Lightmatter is taking a differentiated approach by using silicon photonics and bringing together a deeply technical team to further its mission. We’re thrilled to continue supporting Lightmatter’s next stage of growth as they build the leading silicon photonics company.”
— Erik Nordlander, General Partner at GV
