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Silicon photonics for AI — photonic interconnects that move data at the speed of light
HQ: Boston, MA, United States | Founded: 2017 | Employees: ~400-500 (est.) | Stage: Late Stage VC ($4.4B valuation) | Website: https://lightmatter.co
Lightmatter was founded in 2017 by Nick Harris, Darius Bunandar, and Thomas Graham as a spinout from MIT's photonics research, with a contrarian thesis: as transistors stop scaling, the bottleneck in AI data centers shifts to moving data — and light, not copper, is the answer. The company initially pursued photonic AI compute (the Envise processor and Idiom software), then repositioned around interconnect, where the physics advantage is clearest.
Its Passage platform is a family of 3D-stacked silicon-photonic engines that provide fiber-level bandwidth at chip scale: Passage Guide brings optical links into racks for scale-up compute, Passage L200 (announced April 2025) is described as the fastest co-packaged optics engine for AI systems, and Passage M1000 is a photonic superchip unveiled i
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