
We just don't have the hardware that can run those algorithms."Īccording to Luminous, the issue is that current computers use electrical signals, which drags on performance as signals travel.
#LUMINOUS COMPUTING SERIES BILL GATES SOFTWARE#
What's frustrating is that we have the software to address monumental, revolutionary problems that humans can't even begin to solve. "We can interact with computers in natural language and ask them to write a piece of code or even an essay, and the output will be better than most humans could provide. "AI has become superhuman," Marcus Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Luminous, said in a statement. The goal is to use light rather than electricity running over wires to send signals, which proponents argue will enable the development of more sophisticated and less expensive AI systems. The company is among a growing number of vendors that are turning to photonics to solve the gnarly problems of compute, latency and memory when it comes to AI and machine learning technology, which are quickly becoming cornerstones of modern applications and industries from autonomous vehicles to pharmaceuticals. It also is continuing to recruit photonics designers, digital and analog very large-scale integration (VSLI) engineers, packaging and system integration engineers and machine learning experts. Luminous officials said the new cash will be used to double the size of the company's engineering team and the build-out of its custom chips and software, as it ramps toward commercial-scale production.


It adds to the $1m in pre-seed money the company received in 2018 and the $9m in seed funding pulled in a year later. The Bay Area upstart, founded in 2018, announced the funding round, which included such firms as Gigafund, 8090 Partners, Third Kind Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group and Strawberry Creek Ventures. Luminous Computing, a startup using photonics to drive artificial intelligence, has raised venture capital backing, pulling in $105m in Series A funding from a range of investors that includes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
