Optalysys, a Leeds, UK-based developer of photonic processing technology, raised £21M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Lingotto, imec.xpand, and Northern Gritstone.
The company intends to use the funds to launch its technology on a cloud-based service model, in partnership with system integrators and service providers, and to expand its team in England, Europe and the US.
Co-founded by Dr Nick New and Robert Todd, Optalysys develops photonic processing technology to unlock a new form of secure processing known as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). The company has created an advanced photonic semiconductor which accelerates the FHE process, allowing encrypted data to be processed at similar speeds to its unencrypted form, and bringing hope of deploying FHE at the scale demanded by secure data applications across most major industries, including finance and banking, manufacturing, healthcare and machine analytics.
Initial photonic systems developed by Optalysys will also be made available to end-users via an Accelerator program – ahead of the first high-speed Enable chips being produced within 24 months.
FHE is a form of quantum-secure cryptography that does not require the data to be decrypted before it can be processed, allowing confidential or sensitive data to be sent along untrusted networks, or to be worked on by multiple parties without ever exposing the data itself.
FinSMEs
18/07/2023