It takes an immense amount of processing power to create and operate the “AI” features we all use so often, from playlist generation to voice recognition. Lightmatter is a startup that is looking to change the way all that computation is done — and not in a small way. The company makes photonic chips that essentially perform calculations at the speed of light, leaving transistors in the dust. It just closed an $11 million Series A.
The claim may sound grandiose, but the team and the tech definitely check out. Nick Harris, Lightmatter’s CEO, wrote his thesis on this stuff at MIT, and has published in major journals like Nature Photonics several papers showing the feasibility of the photonic computing architecture.
So what exactly does Lightmatter’s hardware do?