Neurophos is a semiconductor startup based in Austin, that manufactures high powered, energy efficient photonic chips for AI inference. The company was established by Dr Patrick Bowen and Dr Andrew Traverso, who have gathered a professional team of experts with deep experience from major tech and hardware companies such NVDIA, Apple and Meta. Neurophos just secured a funding round from major investors including M12(Microsoft) to advance its photonic AI chip development.

The company is addressing a major bottleneck in the AI industry. Traditional silicon based GPUs are struggling to support the demands of modern AI algorithms. To solve this Neurophos has developed a novel Optical Processing Unit (OPU). Unlike traditional chips, this chip uses light-based(photonic) computing and metamaterials to perform calculations.

The company has been able to achieve massive miniaturization, they have managed to shrink optical components by 10000x, allowing them to fit over a million processing elements onto a single chip. The company has claimed that the chips have huge performance gains, their technology can provide up to 100x the performance and energy efficiency of traditional chips.

Neurophos also claims that their chips are more sustainable, reducing the amount of electricity required for high level AI inference, hence reducing the carbon footprint of data centers. Neurophos also chips also boasts seamless integration, the chips are designed to be drop in replacements for existing GPUs, allowing data centers to easily upgrade their infrastructure.

The new capital will be used to finalize the company’s first integrated compute system, expand its software stack and open a new engineering facility in San Francisco. Investors and industry experts view this as a “physics-level” breakthrough that would be able to support modern AI models, as traditional Moore’s law begins to plateau.