TEL AVIV, Israel, Aug. 8, 2024 — LightSolver, inventor of a new 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 from the EIC Fund combined with a future equity investment of €10 million, totaling €12.5M. This recognition places LightSolver among 68 companies chosen from a highly competitive pool of 969 applicants.

The funding is a direct endorsement of LightSolver’s commitment 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). The company will leverage the resources granted by the EIC to advance the commercialization of its platform and accelerate its growth in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector.

LightSolver’s novel processor, the Laser Processing Unit (LPU), harnesses the natural properties of light to execute complex mathematical operations, enabling industry and research to process compute-intensive workloads in a rapid and energy-efficient way. Applications such as computer-assisted engineering (CAE), bio-science computations, and intractable optimization problems are amongst the workloads that can be greatly accelerated by LightSolver’s platform.

“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 European Innovation Council (EIC) is an initiative by the European Commission to support high-potential startups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and researchers in developing and scaling breakthrough innovations. Launched to drive Europe’s leadership in new technologies and innovation, the EIC aims to identify, support, and invest in the most promising innovative projects across various sectors, including computing, energy, telecom, pharmaceutical, medical and more.

About LightSolver

LightSolver has successfully harnessed the unique physical properties of light to develop the first pure laser-based processing unit (LPU), an innovative computing method that is poised to outpace and outperform quantum and supercomputers. It utilizes all-optical coupled lasers that require no electronics to compute, enabling it to be as small as a traditional desktop computer while offering unrivaled scalability, low power requirements, and room temperature operation. Dr. Ruti Ben-Shlomi and Dr. Chene Tradonsky, physicists from the world-renowned Weizmann Institute, founded the company in 2020. More than 2/3 of the team are math and physics PhDs. LightSolver has secured investment from TAL Ventures, Entree Capital, IBI Tech Fund, and Angular Ventures.

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Source: Lightsolver