Lingotto, the investment arm of Exor, has financed a British startup that produces photonic chips. It’s called Optalysys, it’s based in Leeds, and this month it obtained an investment of 21 million pounds, around 24 million euros. Optalysys, founded about 10 years ago, is developing technology in the field of silicon photonics, which are chips that use light instead of electricity to perform calculations and transmit data. A sector that has been attracting a lot of investment in recent years, especially due to its promise of creating chips capable of increasing the speed of information processing without proportionally increasing energy consumption.
Furthermore, this technology would allow for more secure data management, thanks to a level of encryption that would protect them from attacks even if carried out by quantum computers. “Our challenge is to become the Nvidia of this type of encryption,” said Nick New, co-founder and CEO of Optalysys.
According to the Financial Times, several researchers in recent years have warned about the risks associated with the development of quantum computers, super powerful machines capable of bypassing all the cybersecurity systems developed so far. This is why investors are increasingly paying attention to companies that develop technologies capable of securing data and information.
Lingotto is an investment company of Exor founded last May with an investment capacity of 3 billion. The investment round in Optalysys also saw the participation of Imec-xpand, the investment arm of the Imec group, and Northern Gristone, a fund created by the universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield to support university spin-offs.
The chips developed by Optalysys are based on a new type of technology that allows data to be processed without having to unlock it. The technical name of this frontier of innovation is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (Fhe) and promises to enable encrypted data processing in the cloud, preserving customer privacy in sensitive sectors, such as finance or healthcare. The concept is not new. We have been trying to work on this solution for years. But so far the costs of developing this technology have been prohibitive.
Optalysys may have found a way to reduce costs with photonic chips. And it aims for large-scale production of these processors within three years. The funds will be used to bring high-profile technical people on board the company, capable of strengthening the development team.
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– 2024-03-16 22:41:09
