About Opticore
Opticore is developing optical processing units, or OPUs, which perform AI calculations using light guided through waveguides instead of electrons moving through transistors. The company says this can lower energy use and allow faster clock speeds than GPUs, though those claims are its own. It was spun out of research at MIT, USC and UC Berkeley, and Zaijun Chen is chief executive with Ryan Hamerly and Mengjie Yu as co-founders. It announced a 7.5 million dollar seed extension in September 2025, bringing total funding to 14.5 million dollars.
Opticore was founded in 2023 and is based in Fremont, United States. It is listed under Photonic Computing. Reported funding is $7.5M seed extension (Sept 2025), total $14.5M.
Compute Technologies
- Photonics
What Opticore 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.
Also in United States
II-VI/Finisar (now Coherent), Celestial AI, Lightwave Logic, Inphi (now Marvell), Lumentum
