Neurophos Raises $110 Million to Develop Photonic AI Chips

Neurophos has raised $110 million in a Series A funding round to advance its photonic AI inference chips, announced in a press release. The round was led by Gates Frontier, with participation from Microsoft’s M12, Carbon Direct Capital, Aramco Ventures, Bosch Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, and others.

The Austin-based company, spun out of Duke University, is developing an optical processing unit (OPU) that integrates over one million micron-scale optical processing elements on a single chip. These elements are based on metamaterial optical modulators that are 10,000 times smaller than traditional photonic components, allowing for high-density, energy-efficient computation.

Neurophos claims its technology can deliver up to 100 times the performance and energy efficiency of current AI accelerators, offering a drop-in replacement for GPUs in data centers. The company plans to use the new funding to complete its first integrated photonic compute system, including datacenter-ready OPU modules, a full software stack, and early-access developer hardware.

The company is expanding its headquarters in Austin and opening a new engineering site in San Francisco to support early customer demand.