A theoretical physicist believes he has made a breakthrough in photonics analysis that may allow us to have sooner and higher processors — a significant want in synthetic intelligence, quantum computing, and different tech with heavy workloads. Now, his startup has acquired early backing from NATO, the European authorities, and different key traders to provide these chips.
Ephos has raised $8.5 million in seed funding that it’s going to use to construct out and function a brand new R&D and manufacturing facility close to Milan centered on glass-based quantum photonics.
There are others like Ephos with bight concepts about photonics, together with Xanadu (valued at $1 billion), Photonic (backed by Microsoft), Oxford spinout Orca (backed by the U.S. DoD) and extra. However Ephos, with its deal with chips, says that its facility would be the “world’s first dedicated to producing glass-based quantum photonic circuits.”
Andrea Rocchetto, the Italian theoretical physicist who’s the CEO of Ephos (pictured right here) mentioned he got here up with the concept for constructing Ephos and establishing it in Italy on the peak of Covid-19.
After research in Rome, London, and Oxford, he was engaged on postdoctoral analysis on the College of Texas at Austin when the pandemic struck.
“I flew back to Italy and reconnected with the community here and realized that there was this immense talent pool that was completely outside of the big trends in technology,” he mentioned. “There were no startups building quantum technologies.” He linked up with with three different highlydecorated quantum and laptop science researchers — Francesco Ceccarelli, Giacomo Corrielli and Roberto Osellame — in 2022 and began Ephos to fill that void.
As Rocchetto sees it, that void is not only a geographic however a technological one.
Computational infrastructure, as we all know by the massive revenues reaped by corporations like Nvidia and the massive payments that large foundational AI corporations rack up for coaching and operating fashions, is beneath stress. Nevertheless it’s not simply AI. New improvements like quantum computing are additionally placing strain on the {hardware} we’ve got at the moment. Within the U.S. alone, Rocchetto mentioned, about 9% of the power generated within the U.S. might be used for operating knowledge facilities, so the demand is to get them to be sooner and extra environment friendly. “Photonics and quantum computing can both answer those needs,” he mentioned.
Utilizing chips that course of mild — photons, particularly — is one very environment friendly approach to switch knowledge, and Ephos’s wager is that constructing photonics chips utilizing (glass) fiber optics would be the finest base for these and the least prone to end in photon loss. “Glass helps a lot for that,” he mentioned. “The chips of our competitors are silicon-made, but light hates to move from one material into another. By building the entire infrastructure on glass, we can dramatically reduce those coupling losses between fibers and chips.”
Ephos has one leg on this planet of deep tech, and one on this planet of commercialized alternative. Its quantum facility is already open — a few of the funding was really raised earlier within the 12 months — however the first chips have but to be made. These ought to come out within the subsequent weeks, nonetheless, “and we expect the fab to be fully operational by the end of the year,” Rocchetto mentioned.
Early curiosity has been from quantum computing startups, however he added that the startup can be seeing curiosity from so-called “hyperscalers,” large tech corporations that construct their very own knowledge facilities, and the information middle builders who work with them. The checklist of these investing are an fascinating clue as to who a few of these hyperscalers is likely to be.
Starlight Ventures out of the U.S. is main the spherical with Collaborative Fund, Exor Ventures, 2100 Ventures, and Unruly Capital additionally taking part. Angels within the spherical embody Simone Severini (Amazon Net Providers’ GM overseeing quantum applied sciences), Diego Piacentini (previously a senior VP at Amazon), and Joe Zadeh (former VP of Airbnb). Ephos can be getting backing from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator (also referred to as DIANA).
The truth that Ephos is in Europe just isn’t a small element. There was a giant push the world over for areas to double down on extra of their very own infrastructure throughout a spread of verticals amid geopolitcal and macroeconomic instability — collectively known as “resilience”. On this case, Ephos can be getting backing from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator (also referred to as DIANA).
Whereas Ephos sees its main alternative as considered one of addressing a necessity in computing, “As a company, we are very much interested in building transatlantic ties,” mentioned Rocchetto. “We very much believe defense is a critical area for the growth of our company, because historically, the defense sector has been one of the first buyers of new computational technology. So we keep a close eye on the space.”
