Matrix, CICC back Chinese optical chip pioneer

Other investors include Vertex Venture, CASstar - an incubator program under the Chinese Academy of Sciences - and China Merchants Venture. Existing investors Baidu Ventures and FreesFund - which provided a $10.7 million angel round in 2018 - re-upped.

Lightelligence aims to replace traditional electronic chips with optical chips for the complicated computing tasks in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI). By processing information using light, optical chips offer higher speeds, lower latency, and lower power consumption. The company employs 50 staff in Boston and Shanghai.

Founder Yichen Shen was born in China but went to the US for his graduate and postgraduate studies. In 2017, while studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) he published an article in the journal Nature Photonics that discussed the feasibility of an optical computing system. He realized the theory in a lab and then developed a chip and a deep learning algorithm.

A prototype was produced with a machine learning model that used computer vision to recognize handwriting. Tests found that the optical chip could process 95% of the sample with 97% accuracy, close to that of an electronic chip. However, it completed the task 100 times faster than an electronic chip.

Lightelligence plans to launch its first commercial product for data centers. It is in contact with potential customers such as Google, Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

“Optical computing is expected to break through the bottleneck of electronic computing from a completely different dimension and improve artificial intelligence training efficiency for autonomous driving, security controls, financial transactions, and other areas that place a high value on computing speed. It is like when GPUs replaced CPUs with the rise of AI,” said Lingye Zuo, a partner at Matrix, in a statement.

In the chip space,  Hua Capital, a Chinese investment firm that primarily focuses on the semiconductor industry, has agreed to acquire an Asia-based mobile LCD chip business from US-listed Synaptics for $120 million in December.

Related investments include a RMB100 million round for Bosheng Guangdian in March. The company develops optical semiconductors featuring vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) that can be used in facial recognition. VC firms are also putting money into technologies such as LiDAR, which is used to detect obstacles in autonomous driving. Hesai Technology, a China-based specialist in this field, recently raised a $173 million Series C round.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Technology
• China
• TMT
• artificial intelligence
• Baidu
• Vertex Ventures
• Frees Fund
• Matrix Partners
• CICC