Optalysys Secures £23 Million to Advance Photonic Computing and US Expansion

Optalysys, enabling a world of secure computing, led by Nick New, Robert Todd, Stuart Mellis, Marcella Arthur, Laura Stanley, and others, has secured £23 million in a Series A extension round led by Northern Gritstone with participation from imec.xpand, Lingotto Horizon, and the UK government’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF).

The funding will accelerate the commercialisation of Optalysys’ photonic chips and support expansion into the US market.

As AI and cloud workloads scale, electronic computing is approaching physical limits. Optalysys integrates data movement and processing on a single photonic-digital chip to deliver high compute performance with lower energy use. The platform targets GenAI, post-quantum workloads, and fully homomorphic encryption, with early FHE capabilities already deployed in LightLocker™ Node servers for encrypted blockchain applications.

Optalysys highlighted photonic computing as a step-change in data movement and processing speed and efficiency, with the latest funding validating the commercial opportunity and supporting expansion into new markets. The company emphasized that combining compute and data movement in a single package addresses electronic computing limits driven by large AI workloads, with US expansion enabling access to the Silicon Valley photonics ecosystem and talent pool. Investors described Optalysys as a next-generation computing platform with strong technical progress and commercial momentum, backing continued commercialization across multiple industries.