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 obtained 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’ll 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 concentrate on 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 thought 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 pc 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 large revenues reaped by firms like Nvidia and the big payments that large foundational AI firms rack up for coaching and working fashions, is below stress. But it surely’s not simply AI. New improvements like quantum computing are additionally placing strain on the {hardware} we now have at this time. Within the U.S. alone, Rocchetto mentioned, about 9% of the vitality generated within the U.S. will probably be used for working information 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 strategy to switch information, and Ephos’s guess is that constructing photonics chips utilizing (glass) fiber optics would be the finest base for these and the least prone to lead to 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 the planet of deep tech, and one on the planet of commercialized alternative. Its quantum facility is already open — a number of the funding was really raised earlier within the yr — however the first chips have but to be made. These ought to come out within the subsequent weeks, nevertheless, “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 also be seeing curiosity from so-called “hyperscalers,” large tech firms that construct their very own information facilities, and the information heart builders who work with them. The record of these investing are an attention-grabbing clue as to who a few of these hyperscalers may 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 embrace Simone Severini (Amazon Net Companies’ GM overseeing quantum applied sciences), Diego Piacentini (previously a senior VP at Amazon), and Joe Zadeh (former VP of Airbnb). Ephos can also 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 an enormous push internationally for areas to double down on extra of their very own infrastructure throughout a variety of verticals amid geopolitcal and macroeconomic instability — collectively known as “resilience”. On this case, Ephos can also be getting backing from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator (also referred to as DIANA).
Whereas Ephos sees its major alternative as one in every 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.”
