optical-computing
(4)
Neurophos
Neurophos is an Austin-based photonics startup building an Optical Processing Unit (OPU) that uses light instead of electrons to run AI inference. Spun out of Duke University and the Metacept incubator, the company packs more than a million micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators - roughly 10,000x smaller than conventional photonic elements - onto a single chip to perform the matrix-vector multiplication at the heart of large AI models. It positions the OPU as an energy-efficient, drop-in alternative to GPUs for data-center inference, and raised a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier in January 2026.
S2 Corporation
S2 Corporation is a Bozeman, Montana photonics company that reads the radio spectrum the way a hologram stores an image - all at once. Its core technology, spatial-spectral (S2) holography, uses a cooled, sugar-cube-sized crystal doped with rare-earth atoms as an optical computer that captures and processes radio frequencies across enormous instantaneous bandwidths (0.03 to 110 GHz). Packaged as the Extreme Bandwidth Analyzer and Correlator (EBAC), the technology serves electronic warfare, signals intelligence, RF spectrum monitoring, emitter geolocation, and data mining for U.S. defense and intelligence customers including DARPA and IARPA.
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.
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.