Lightmatter, a Boston-based AI hardware company that utilizes integrated optical technology to create faster and more efficient processors, has raised funding from Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV (formerly known as Google Ventures). Specifically, Lightmatter taps into an optical component known as a Mach-Zehnder interferometer rather than multiplier-accumulator (MAC) units. And as Lightmatter’s hardware technology becomes mainstream, it will be a game changer for the advancement of artificial intelligence.
Lightmatter’s Series A round ended up closing at $33 million last month. Matrix Partners and Spark Capital also participated in this round.
Thomas Graham, Lightmatter co-founder and COO, told CNBC that investors were skeptical about the idea at first. “Prove to me this is actually more than a science project,” recalled Graham while referring to feedback received from potential investors.
The origin of Lightmatter co-founder and CEO Nicholas Harris and co-founder and chief scientist Darius Bunandar started coming together in 2014 when the two of them were trying to combine optical technology with quantum computing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Harris and Bunandar were studying for a Ph.D. in the same research group.
Quantum computing taps into the creation of quantum bits (qubits) rather than the ones and zeroes associated with classical computing. Quantum bits are expressed as ones and zeroes at the same time. Technology companies like Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft are all researching and developing quantum computing.
One year later, Harris and Bunandar started looking into the field of artificial intelligence and they took entrepreneurship classes at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. In those classes, they met Graham — who worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. As part of the classes, students had to make videos about business ideas and Graham was impressed by Harris’ video. And so the three of them became friends, put together a business plan, and enrolled in MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
The three of them ended up winning the $100K competition and was judged by GV general partner Erik Nordlander. With the proceeds from the competition award, the team went to Silicon Valley to meet with more investors. But they were continuously met with skepticism from investors about putting money into a chip startup since those businesses are capital intensive.
Eventually, investors were convinced to get on-board. In about a year, Lightmatter created two early chips and the most recent one has more than a billion transistors.
Lightmatter will initially sell chips to organizations that have big cloud computing data centers and high-tech computing clusters. And one of the advantages they have is throughput (the number of operations that can be performed per second) and efficiency (operations performed per second per watt of power).
