# Arago

> Arago is a Paris and Palo Alto deeptech startup building a photonic AI accelerator that uses light instead of electrons to run AI workloads, targeting 10x lower energy consumption than today's leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost while staying compatible with PyTorch and standard hardware ecosystems.

- **Founded:** 2024
- **Headquarters:** Paris, France / Palo Alto, United States
- **Founders:** Nicolas Muller (Co-founder & CEO), Eliott Sarrey (Co-founder & CTO), Ambroise Müller (Co-founder & CSO)
- **Team size:** ~40 employees across France, North America and Israel
- **Products:** JEF, CARLOTA
- **Notable:** Closed an oversubscribed $26M seed round less than a year after founding (July 2025)., Assembled angel backing from Bertrand Serlet (ex-Apple, Fungible), Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) and Christophe Frey (Arm)., Demonstrated early results running industry-standard AI models on a photonic compute path.

## Products & services

- **JEF** — Photonic AI accelerator that processes high-volume matrix operations with light, paired with a deterministic electronic control unit for pointwise operations. Targets 10x lower energy than leading GPUs at equivalent performance.
- **CARLOTA** — Software stack that abstracts the photonic hardware and provides PyTorch compatibility, so developers can deploy existing AI models without rewriting them.

## Achievements

- Closed an oversubscribed $26M seed round less than a year after founding (July 2025).
- Assembled angel backing from Bertrand Serlet (ex-Apple, Fungible), Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) and Christophe Frey (Arm).
- Demonstrated early results running industry-standard AI models on a photonic compute path.
- Scaled from founding to ~40 people across three continents in roughly a year.

## Latest updates

- **2025-07** — Announced $26M seed round co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow.
- **2025-09** — Featured by Photonics Spectra and EE Times as one of the most-watched optical computing companies of the year.

## Links

- Website: https://arago.inc
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aragoinc/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/arago
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-29