# Lightmatter

> Lightmatter is building a photonic supercomputer. The Mountain View company uses light, not electrons, to move data between AI chips - tackling the bandwidth and energy wall that's about to crash into the next generation of data centers. Its Passage interconnect and Envise processor aim to connect millions of chips at the speed of light.

- **Founded:** 2017
- **Headquarters:** Mountain View, California, United States
- **Founders:** Nicholas Harris (Co-founder & CEO), Darius Bunandar (Co-founder & Chief Scientist), Thomas Graham (Co-founder (former President/COO))
- **Team size:** ~290 employees
- **Products:** Passage, Passage M1000, Envise, Idiom
- **Notable:** First 3D-stacked photonics engine (Passage), Passage M1000: 114 Tbps optical bandwidth (industry record), Raised over $850M total funding

## Products & services

- **Passage** — Wafer-scale 3D photonic interconnect that links many processors with an on-chip optical network.
- **Passage M1000** — 3D Photonic Superchip with a record 114 Tbps of optical bandwidth, designed for next-gen XPUs and switches.
- **Envise** — Photonic AI processor that uses light to perform key neural-network operations.
- **Idiom** — Software stack for compiling, optimizing, and deploying models onto photonic hardware.

## Achievements

- First 3D-stacked photonics engine (Passage)
- Passage M1000: 114 Tbps optical bandwidth (industry record)
- Raised over $850M total funding
- Quadrupled valuation in under a year to $4.4B
- Core77 Design Award for hardware

## Latest updates

- **2024-10** — Closed $400M Series D at $4.4B valuation.
- **2025-03** — Announced Passage M1000 photonic superchip.
- **2025-11** — Expanded manufacturing partnership with GlobalFoundries; commercial shipments targeted for 2027.

## Links

- Website: https://lightmatter.co
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightmatter
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lightmatterco
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/lightmatterco

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/lightmatter
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-19