About Enlightra
Enlightra develops chip-scale lasers that emit many wavelengths of light from a single source. Each wavelength can carry its own stream of data, so one laser can stand in for dozens of separate ones in optical links between GPUs and other chips. The lasers use silicon photonics manufacturing, and the aim is to replace copper wiring in AI clusters with lower power use and a smaller footprint. The company has built 8 and 16 channel devices and plans pilot production in 2027. Enlightra was founded in 2022 by John Jost and Maxim Karpov and is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Enlightra was founded in 2022 and is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is listed under Photonic Computing, Interconnect & Networking. Reported funding is $15M seed (Dec 2025).
Compute Technologies
- Photonic Computing
What Enlightra works on
Photonic Computing
Photonic computing uses light instead of electricity to carry or process information. Photons have no charge, so light in a waveguide does not cause the resistive heating that current in a wire does, though lasers and modulators still use power, and many wavelengths can share one waveguide. The industry has two quite different parts: moving data with light, and computing with light.
Interconnect & Networking
Interconnect is the set of links that move data between chips, between boards and between racks. It includes wires on a package, cables inside a server, and the network switches and optical fibre across a data center. A processor is only as useful as the speed at which it can get data in and out.
