LightSolver awarded €12.5M from the European Innovation Council to advance its all-optical supercomputer
LightSolver awarded €12.5M from the European Innovation Council to advance its all-optical supercomputer
The Israeli startup was selected for the accelerator due to its first all-optical supercomputer that is more energy-efficient than classical computers
LightSolver, a company that is developing a laser-based computing paradigm, has announced that it has been selected for the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Program. The company will receive an initial grant of €2.5 million (NIS 10.4M) from the EIC Fund and a future equity investment of €10 million (NIS 41.7M), totaling €12.5 million (NIS 52.2M). LightSolver joins 67 other companies chosen from a pool of 969 applicants.
“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,” said LightSolver CEO and co-founder Ruti Ben-Shlomi, Ph.D. “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.”
The company is committed 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). LighSolver’s processor, the Laser Processing Unit (LPU), harnesses the natural property of light to execute mathematical operations and help industry and research to process compute-intensive workloads in a rapid and energy-efficient way. Workloads that can be accelerated with its platform include computer-assisted engineering (CAE), bio-science computations, and intractable optimization problems.
The company will use the EIC resources to advance the commercialization of its platform and accelerate its growth in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector.
The EIC is an initiative by the European Commission to support startups, SMEs, and researchers to develop and scale innovations. It was launched as a way to drive Europe's leadership in new technology and innovation and aims to identify, support, and
invest in projects across sectors such as computing, energy, telecom, pharmaceutical, medical and more.
LightSolver was founded in 2020 by Weizmann Institute physicists Dr. Ruti Ben-Shlomi and Dr. Chene Tradonsky. It has to date secured investment from TAL Ventures, Entrée Capital, IBI Tech Fund, and Angular Ventures.
