Photonic computing firm iPronics has raised €3.7M in investment to help bring its general-purpose, software-reconfigurable photonic processor to market.
The firm will also use the capital to expand its engineering team and product development.
The investment was made primarily by Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Caixa Capital Risc.
Emerging technology trends in autonomous vehicles and lidar, 5G signal processing, deep learning and AI, cyber security, DNA sequencing, and drug discovery require much faster, more flexible, power-efficient computation.
Although advanced electronic chips (e.g. GPUs, TPUs or FPGAs) are continually advancing in capability, according to iPronics they cannot keep up with increasing performance requirements, leading to today’s hardware forming a bottleneck.
Computational photonics (i.e. photonic chips) represents an ideal solution due to it providing lower latency, lower power consumption (photons/light consume less energy than electrons), higher bandwidth, and higher density.
More on this story: Interview with iPronics co-founders Jose Capmany and Daniel Perez-Lopez
iPronics has therefore introduced a new generation of photonic circuits where common hardware can be programmed using software for a wide variety of applications, through a mesh of on-chip waveguides and tunable beam couplers.
According to the firm, the reconfigurability of the ‘Field Programmable Photonic Gate Array (FPPGA)’ chip unlocks new commercial applications by delivering faster time to market with lower total cost and risk mitigation while delivering on the promises of photonic processing. It also democratises the adoption of photonic technology by enabling its use by software engineers without expertise in hardware or photonics.
The firm – a spinoff of the Technical University of Valencia – has developed seven patents on the technology and has published at least four seminal papers in the journal Nature.
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'We know that photonic computing is the answer to many of the bottlenecks of new killer applications, but designing and building one photonic chip for each of those applications is not practical,' said Professor Jose Capmany, co-founder of iPronics and Fellow of the IEEE and Optical Society of America. 'Reconfigurability of photonic chips with software is the answer.'
Amelia Armour, partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, added: 'As long term investors in disruptive chip design technology, we are excited to back the team that pioneered the concept of programmable photonics and first demonstrated it in the lab. We look forward to helping the team to bring the chip to market at scale’.
Previous strategic angel investors include successful tech executives and entrepreneurs from Google, Facebook, Carto, Freshly, Endeavor, Oracle, Deloitte, Ferrovial, and Clicars among others. The company had previously received €1M in funding from co-founder and tech entrepreneur Inaki Berenguer.
