Opticore, a company developing next‑generation optical computing solutions, announced it has secured $7.5 million in new financing to accelerate the development of its breakthrough photonic chip technology. This latest round builds on the company’s pre‑seed funding from last year, bringing its total capital raised to $14.5 million. The funding round included participation from Neotribe Ventures and Thunderbolt Ventures, alongside other backers who see the potential for Opticore’s approach to redefine high‑performance computing.
The company is engineering a photonic computing chip that it says can deliver up to 100 times greater energy efficiency and 25 times the computing density of today’s leading graphics processing units. This leap in performance is made possible by Opticore’s patented time‑multiplexed computing architecture, which allows the encoding of one trillion parameters on a single chip. By enabling parallel computation at 100 trillion operations per second per watt, the design promises to handle massive workloads while consuming only a fraction of the power required by conventional electronic processors.
Unlike other optical computing methods that face high energy overhead and limited scalability, Opticore’s system uses dynamic weights, making it capable of both real‑time training and inference. This flexibility means the same chip can be used to develop and deploy AI models without the need for separate hardware. Another advantage is that the technology is compatible with standard semiconductor foundry processes, allowing it to be manufactured at scale using existing production infrastructure.
The company has already completed successful demonstration tapeouts this year, validating key aspects of its design. The next significant milestone will be a fully scaled system demonstration, which Opticore expects to deliver in 2026. If successful, the technology could have far‑reaching implications for industries that rely on high‑performance computing, from artificial intelligence and data analytics to scientific research and advanced simulations.
KEY QUOTES:
“Energy-intensity of existing electronics-based AI compute solutions is straining electrical grids, capping the scale-out of data centers. Scaling AI requires fundamentally new approaches to computing efficiency.”
Prashant Shukla, partner at Origin Ventures, which co-led Opticore’s seed round alongside Jetha Global
“We see the silicon photonics roadmap unfolding in stages: first switches and co-packaged optics, then optical interconnect solutions, and ultimately full optical processing.”
Karan Danthi, CIO at Jetha Global
“Our photonic computing architecture isn’t constrained by Moore’s Law and can achieve world-class performance while consuming a fraction of the energy budget. We envision a future where data centers won’t need their own power plants, and the heaviest compute workloads can be offloaded to photonic processors, shaping the multi-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure buildout.”
Co-founder Zaijun Chen
“The ability to produce better-than-leading-edge CMOS performance on lagging nodes opens up latent capacity in semiconductor fabrication – and all in the United States.”
Opticore’s first investor Alex Turnbull of Sagax Capital
