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An innovative UK chip designer has secured multi-million-pound funding from investors, including the influential Agnelli family from Italy, for its light-powered technology that tackles a major data security challenge. Optalysys, based in Leeds, recently raised £21 million in a Series A funding round, led by Lingotto and Exor, the investment company owned by the Agnelli family. With this funding, Optalysys plans to create jobs and attract professionals from prestigious companies like Arm and Imagination as it moves closer to production.
Optalysys specializes in silicon photonics, an advanced technology that uses light instead of electricity for computations. This groundbreaking technology is particularly suitable for developing new encryption methods, enabling more secure and private data sharing among companies and even countries. As the semiconductor industry faces challenges in terms of slower advancements and increasing costs with traditional silicon processors, there is growing investment in optical chips. These chips offer accelerated processing speeds without consuming excessive energy.
Optalysys’ co-founder and CEO, Nick New, claims that their technology can provide robust encryption that can withstand hacking attempts, even from quantum computers. Their goal is to become a leading provider of secure processing, similar to Nvidia’s success in powering various artificial intelligence applications. With large-scale quantum computers expected to overpower current cryptography algorithms, the race is on to develop post-quantum encryption.
The Lingotto fund, initiated by the Agnelli family, invested alongside Imec.xpand and Northern Gritstone. Optalysys’ accelerator chips will support a new type of encryption technology that enables data processing without the need for decryption. Collaborations with Google and IBM are focusing on “fully homomorphic encryption,” allowing encrypted data to be processed in the cloud and across untrusted networks. This development facilitates data sharing while maintaining privacy, particularly crucial in sectors such as healthcare and financial services.
Optalysys relocated from Cambridge to Leeds over a decade ago to take advantage of the photonics and optical expertise in the area. The company aims to achieve scaled-up production of its processors, known as “chiplets,” in approximately three years. Its recent equity investment values the company at £20 million, excluding the latest funding round.
Optalysys has been expanding its team by recruiting professionals from renowned UK chip companies like Arm, Imagination, and Graphcore. The company plans to increase its headcount from 18 to over 50 within the next year. This expansion is facilitated by the availability of talent in the job market, as other chip companies are grappling with the fluctuating trends caused by the pandemic.
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