About Optalysys
Optalysys develops photonic chips that use light to carry out Fourier transforms, a core operation in fully homomorphic encryption, which allows data to be processed while it remains encrypted. The aim is to make encrypted computing fast enough for practical use, where conventional processors are far too slow. The company is based in Leeds, England, and was founded in 2013 by Nick New and Robert Todd. Its backers include Northern Gritstone, and the UK government's National Security Strategic Investment Fund took part in a later round.
Optalysys was founded in 2013 and is based in Leeds, United Kingdom. It is listed under Photonic Computing, AI Accelerators. Reported funding is £23M (€26.4M) Series A extension (Jan 2026, Northern Gritstone-led).
Compute Technologies
- Photonic Computing
- AI Accelerators
What Optalysys 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 United Kingdom
Salience Labs, Blueshift Memory, RedWave Labs, Opteran, Imagination Technologies
