September 10, 2025 — Leads & Copy — Opticore has obtained $7.5 million in additional funding to accelerate the development of its optical computing technology. This new investment builds on the company’s previous pre-seed round, bringing total funding to $14.5 million.
The next-generation photonic computing chip being developed by Opticore promises to be up to 100 times more energy efficient and offer 25 times the computing density of current GPUs.
According to Prashant Shukla, partner at Origin Ventures, the energy-intensity of electronics-based AI compute solutions is straining electrical grids, capping the scale-out of data centers. Karan Danthi, CIO at Jetha Global, anticipates the silicon photonics roadmap unfolding in stages: first switches and co-packaged optics, then optical interconnect solutions, and finally full optical processing.
Opticore’s architecture isn’t constrained by Moore’s Law and can achieve performance while consuming a fraction of the energy budget, says co-founder Zaijun Chen. The company envisions data centers without their own power plants, with compute workloads offloaded to photonic processors.
Opticore’s financing also included investment from Neotribe Ventures and Thunderbolt Ventures.
Opticore’s approach leverages time-multiplexed computing to encode a trillion parameters on a single chip while achieving 100 TOPS/W compute efficiency through parallel computation. The technology is compatible with standard foundry processes, making it scalable for commercial production. The company expects to have its first scaled system demonstration in 2026.
Opticore’s technology is built with exclusive patents from academic work by co-founder Dr. Ryan Hamerly and advisor Prof. Dirk Englund, CEO and co-founder Dr. Chen.
Contact: Adam Cai adam@opticore.ai
Source: Opticore
