[Funding alert] LightSpeedAI Labs raises undisclosed funds from YourNest, growX ventures

Photonics startup LightSpeedAI Labs on Tuesday announced that it raised undisclosed funding from YourNest and growX ventures. The startup will use the raised funds to build the startup’s team, as well as enhance the capabilities of its optoelectronic processors.

The Bengaluru startup was founded in 2019 by Rohin Y and PV Ramana. It builds LightCompute optoelectronic processors for accelerating AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

Speaking on the investment, co-founders Rohin Y and P V Ramana, said,

“We are a unique – and perhaps the first – photonics and computing startup in India. We are attempting to simultaneously solve the interconnect and computing problem for the next-generation artificial intelligence/high-performance computing hardware. With a global market outreach potential, we are gearing up to demonstrate our technology next year. This investment enables us to build and deploy our LightCompute MVP for pilots.”

At present, millions of data are generated in the form of video, images, text and audio every minute. However, all this data cannot be sent to faraway data centres, and hence, it requires local, edge processing. Thus, the startup's processors — equipped with LightSpeedAI’s proprietary high speed optical interconnects — are capable of enabling high data throughput, while being modular and low-power.

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“Traditional chip architectures fail when addressing the needs of diverse and varied use-cases of high-performance computing and AI algorithms. We believe, the founders of LightSpeedAI are building a reconfigurable, modular, and optical interconnect architecture that represents the future of computing. We are delighted to partner in their journey as an early-stage deep tech investor,” said Satish Mugulavalli, Venture Partner, YourNest Venture Capital.

LightSpeedAI's proprietary hardware and software solutions aim to harness the full potential of high-performance computing chips by making them both efficient, as well as versatile.

"Their chipsets will create their own niche in the new world order, being created by 5G and Edge AI,” said Manish Gupta, Principal - growX ventures.