Paris AI photonic processor designer Arago raises $26m
Cette publication existe aussi en Français
Arago in Paris, France, has raised $26m in a seed round to commercialise its photonic processor for AI applications.
The company, which is also based in San Jose, California, has developed a chip, codenamed JEF, that uses laser instead of transistors to provide higher energy efficiency.
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.
Details are scarce on the architecture, except that it is intended for 3D chip designs. This would see the core processor connected via optical links in a photonic substrate to digital devices such as memory in a similar way to companies such as Celestial AI and Lightmatter. The company is hiring an optical co-integration engineer in Paris.
Using photonics for processing would also allow the processor to sit in the interconnect between GPUs and between racks to implement AI algorithms there to further reduce power consumption. ANT in Germany and Oriole in Israel has also developed photonic processors for AI
- Lithium niobate photonic processor for energy efficient AI
- Nvidia looks to silicon photonics to cut datacetnre power
- Celestial AI buys Rockley photonic patents
Arago has also developed a software stack called CARLOTA that interfaces with the PyTorch AI framework to abstract away low-level hardware details. This will enable developers to deploy and scale AI models without modifying their existing codebase.
“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.”
He says the design also sidesteps the technical barriers that have historically limited the performance of photonic processors with the miniaturisation and the integration with the electronic system.
“Arago is creating a ‘DeepSeek moment’ for AI chips,” said Earlybird co-founder Hendrik Brandis. “This technology has the potential to defy the laws of AI compute, using only a fraction of the resources.”
Muller founded the company a year ago with Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller – whose combined expertise spans photonics, electronics, software, mathematics and machine learning and now has a team of 20. The funding will be used to expand the team in Paris and the US.
The oversubscribed $26m 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.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
