The Lumai team. [Image: Lumai]
AI accelerator startup Lumai announced at the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference on 2 April that it had secured more than US$10 million in funding. The company says it plans to use the investment to support product development, double its headcount and expand its presence within the United States.
Toward AI acceleration
A spinout from the University of Oxford, UK, Lumai seeks to leverage optical processing to accelerate large language models, addressing current limitations to AI computing. “Lumai’s revolutionary optical computing technology will help AI data centers dramatically reduce costs and boost performance—while simultaneously minimizing energy consumption,” said the company in a release accompanying the funding announcement. This assertion comes in light of a 2024 analysis by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, that states that the rapidly increasing demand from data centers for AI could consume 12% of US power by 2028, which is triple the current usage.
The funding round was led by the venture capitalist investor Constructor Capital, registered in the Cayman Islands. It was also supported by Lumai’s existing investor IP Group, UK, and new investors PhotonVentures, Netherlands; Journey Ventures, Israel; LIFTT, Italy; Qubits Ventures, USA; State Farm Ventures, USA; and TIS Inc., Japan. Lee Thornton, a partner at IP Group, says, “Having solved the challenges of optical compute to provide a low-cost, scalable solution, Lumai’s technology has the potential to transform the future of AI.”
The startup claims its accelerator will reduce the cost of AI inference—the ability of an AI model to draw accurate conclusions from data it has not previously seen—by 90% compared with existing solutions.
3D optical computing
Lumai’s 3D optical computing design leverages photons in a way that, according to the company, overcomes the current limitations of integrated photonics. The group says it “has succeeded where others have failed, overcoming the scalability challenges of optical computing.”
The technology works by processing arithmetic operations core to AI in beams of light traveling through a 3D space. The company calls the heart of the AI processor, which is built using low-cost optical components, an “optical matrix multiplier.” The startup claims its accelerator will reduce the cost of AI inference—the ability of an AI model to draw accurate conclusions from data it has not previously seen—by 90% compared with existing solutions, while delivering 50 times the performance of silicon-only accelerators.
“By using very wide vectors and high optical clock speeds, data is processed at least 50 times faster and 90% more efficiently than today’s solutions,” reads their website. “We are developing an optical matrix-vector multiplier using a technology that has a near-term speed limit of up to 1,017 operations per second—100 times faster than the human brain and 1,000 times faster than traditional electronics.”
“The future of AI demands radical breakthroughs in computing,” says Lumai CEO and cofounder Tim Weil. “The cost of current LLMs is unsustainable, and next-generation AI won’t happen without a major shift.”