Photonics, the field that underpins light-based systems for data manipulation, has a bright future as the rise of AI demands better computing performance, but has yet to be fully adopted in next-generation chips. German startup Akhetonics hopes to change this. To deliver on this promise, it has raised €6 million (about $6.33 million) in seed funding, TechCrunch can exclusively reveal.
While several companies are using photonics for tangential problems or point solutions that blend electronics and photonics, Akhetonics, a portmanteau of photonics and Akhet, the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning “horizon,” is explicitly aiming to create general-purpose chips. I am using it. .
“General purpose” here means a chip that can be used for all kinds of tasks and software applications. And unlike analog approaches, Akhetonics takes an all-optical approach that is digital and compatible with existing workloads, making it particularly useful in environments that require real-time high performance, such as networking, avionics, and space.
Speed aside, energy efficiency is another aspect where photonics can help, and like chip sovereignty, it is increasingly tied to geopolitics. “The most exciting part for us is that our supply chain is so diverse,” co-founder and CEO Michael Kissner told TechCrunch.
Potentially, Akhetonics could create a universal chip, giving companies access to locally sourced high-performance computing. if It works. That’s a big “what if”. More precisely, ‘when’.
Most observers agree that photonics will make its way into chips. But French VC firm Daphni, for example, recently said it would not invest in commodity chips at the moment.
Lightmatter, a photonics company that initially focused on chips, has found great success by shifting to interconnects, improving data transfer speeds between CPUs and GPUs within data centers.
Although it may still seem like a stretch to some, Matterwave Ventures, the VC firm that led Akhetonics’ new round, believes the time has come to bring fully optical technology to general-purpose computation. “We felt like we had enough to come together to make this a reality,” principal Silviu Apostu told TechCrunch.
It will still take time, but probably not as much as some people think. Akhetonics plans to deliver its first commercial products to customers in the middle of next year. Kissner is confident that feasibility has already been confirmed thanks to a previous funding round from deeptech VC firm Runa Capital in 2023. “I showed it,” he said.
According to Apostu, the key to the Akhetonics approach is to rethink architecture from first principles.
“People think you need billions of (phototransistors),” Kissner added. “But with the right architecture, that’s not the case.” For example, the company explained in a recent paper how it can perform without the typical optimizations that AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and others have applied to current-generation chips.
This also makes the development process cheaper than for regular chips. So for a chip manufacturing business, round sizes are relatively small. Akhetonics said most of the initial funding will be used to expand staff to 30 as the team works to get prototypes to customers. “It’s actually a lot of money for us,” Kissner suggested. “In our world, you can design a chip for €50,000.”
Low cost and local supply chain are two major differences compared to traditional AI semiconductors. Kissner seems genuinely perplexed that the “trillion-dollar AI industry” relies on chips made in a geopolitically troubled region. And Akhetonics’ alternative positioning has clearly resonated with investors. “They really support our mission to create an almost democratized European version of high-performance computing,” he said.
Nonetheless, questions still remain about the commercial demand for high-performance computing and whether specific use cases can be better served by integrated photonics. But for competitors like Akhetonics and LightSolver, all-optical chips are the best answer.
