About LightOn
LightOn was founded in Paris in 2016 by Igor Carron, Laurent Daudet, Florent Krzakala and Sylvain Gigan. It first built an Optical Processing Unit, a co-processor that uses laser light scattered through a material to perform large random projections, a maths step used in some machine learning tasks. The company has since moved its main business to Paradigm, an enterprise generative AI software platform that can run on a customer's own systems. It listed on Euronext Growth Paris in November 2024.
LightOn was founded in 2016 and is based in Paris, France. It is listed under Photonic Computing, AI Accelerators. Reported funding is €11.9M IPO on Euronext Growth Paris (Nov 2024).
Compute Technologies
- Photonic Computing
- AI Accelerators
What LightOn 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.
AI Accelerators
An AI accelerator is a chip, or a part of a chip, designed to run machine learning faster or with less energy than a general-purpose processor. The category includes GPUs, TPUs, neural processing units (NPUs) and chips from many startups.
Also in France
Arago, UPMEM, GreenWaves Technologies, Scintil Photonics, Thales Group
