By Jess Jones
A UK chip designer has secured £21m in a Series A round of investment as it looks to enhance its “groundbreaking” data-sharing security that could pave the way for new levels of encryption able to defend users even from quantum computer-using hackers.
Leeds-based Optalysys has secured the funding led by investment companies Lingotto and Northern Gritstone, along with venture capital fund Imec.xpand.
Lingotto is the $3bn fund launched by Italian dynasty the Agnelli family – owners of Ferrari. Former chancellor George Osbourne is non-executive chair.
Through the investment, the company can improve its enable photonic computing technology to create a new type of secure processing called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). For this potentially game changing technology in the world of encryption, Optalysys is working with partners Google and IBM.
Its designers, Nick New and Robert Todd, believe FHE will allow more private and secure data sharing between multiple parties and on untrusted networks.
“Optalysys presents a groundbreaking semiconductor technology to reduce energy consumption, boost processing power and enhance data security,” said Ashish Kaushik, partner at Lingotto.
The company’s photonics computing technology “will enable new markets with advances in encrypted AI” he said, adding that it will “bring a new level of trust and security to how we use our data”.
Optalysys boss and co-founder Nick New, said: “FHE is just the starting point for where our technology can go.”
Duncan Johnson, chief exec of Northern Gritstone, hailed Optalysys as the “Holy Grail of privacy technologies” because of its capacity to “close the last major vulnerability in cloud and remote processing”.
“This groundbreaking technology exists really nowhere else,” said Kaushik said. While other companies are attempting to develop accelerators for FHE using traditional electronics, Optalysys is the only one approaching the problem using optical chips, he said, bringing breakthrough reductions in energy consumption and processing time.
Co-founders New and Todd, who have been working in optical computing for over two decades, moved from Cambridge to Leeds to call on Leeds University’s expertise in the field.
The investment will also help them expand their team in the UK and beyond in Europe and the US.
This large investment reflects a growing trend of increased funding in optical chips. Data from research firm Global Market Insights estimates that the global FHE market is set to grow to $53bn (£40.5bn) by 2030.
It comes as the semiconductor industry faces rising costs and slowing advancements and amid a race, felt most keenly in the US, to rebalance the global scale away from China’s domination of the market.
