LightSolver, the inventor of a new laser-based computing paradigm, announced that it had been selected for the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Program. And the company will receive an initial grant of €2.5 million from the EIC Fund combined with a future equity investment of €10 million, totaling €12.5 million. This recognition places LightSolver among 68 companies selected from a highly competitive pool of 969 applicants.
This funding round is a direct endorsement of LightSolver’s commitment to building the first all-optical supercomputer that is more energy-efficient than classical computers, drastically reducing the industrial carbon footprint and the Total Cost of Computing (TCoC). And the company will utilize the resources granted by the EIC to advance the commercialization of its platform and accelerate its growth in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector.
LightSolver’s novel processor – the Laser Processing Unit (LPU) – utilizes the natural properties of light to execute complex mathematical operations, enabling industry and research to process compute-intensive workloads rapidly and energy-efficiently. Applications like computer-assisted engineering (CAE), bio-science computations, and intractable optimization problems are among the workloads that LightSolver’s platform can significantly accelerate.
The European Innovation Council (EIC) is an initiative by the European Commission to support high-potential startups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and researchers in developing and scaling breakthrough innovations. Launched to drive Europe’s leadership in new technologies and innovation, the EIC aims to identify, support, and invest in the most promising innovative projects across various sectors, including computing, energy, telecom, pharmaceutical, medical, etc.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re humbled to join the rows of trailblazing startups in fields such as sustainability, MedTech, and space technology that have received funding from the EIC. The amount of energy consumed by computing globally has been growing exponentially and is becoming unsustainable, hence the need for a new computing paradigm. Our laser-based processor can tackle large and complex computations faster than GPUs. It is also much less environmentally demanding than quantum computers, requiring no vacuum or ultracold temperatures which means that it can live in a data center.”
- LightSolver CEO and co-founder Ruti Ben-Shlomi, Ph.D.
