- Lightmatter, a startup building computing technology that uses light as energy, has received $400 million, bringing its worth to $4.4 billion.
- Lightmatter’s hardware allows data to travel quickly over long distances without signal loss, helping data center meet growing demands of large models.
What happened
Lightmatter, based in Mountain View, California, develops photonic technology for data center networking devices. On Wednesday, it announced a $400 million Series D funding round, valuing the company at $4.4 billion. T. Rowe Price led this investment, joined by existing backers Fidelity and Alphabet’s GV. This latest round follows another fundraising round less than a year ago. With this new capital, Lightmatter has raised a total of $850 million since its inception. The company aims to leverage the growing data center market and the increasing demand for efficient infrastructure in the AI competition sparked by ChatGPT. This funding will help Lightmatter enhance its technology and meet the needs of a rapidly evolving industry.
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Why it’s important
Lightmatter plans to use its newly raised capital to prepare the Passage chip for mass deployment in data centers. This chip powers AI and high-performance computing workloads. Photonic semiconductors process data significantly faster than traditional hardware. By using light, Lightmatter’s hardware allows data to travel quickly over long distances without signal loss. Conventional hardware struggles with high-bandwidth data movements, especially for large-scale AI models. In contrast, Lightmatter’s 3D-stacked photonics chips efficiently move data while maintaining performance. The company claims its chips offer ten times greater I/O bandwidth, helping data centers meet the growing demands of large language models.
“We’re not just advancing AI infrastructure— we’re reinventing it,” said Nick Harris, co-founder and CEO of Lightmater. “With Passage, the world’s fastest photonic engine, we’re setting a new standard for performance and breaking through the barriers that limit AI computing. This funding accelerates our ability to scale, delivering the supercomputers of tomorrow today.”
