Luminous Computing Raises $105M in Series A Round to Build World’s Most Powerful AI Supercomputer

Jason R. Wilson

Wccftech


Luminous Computing Raises $105M in Series A Round to Build World’s Most Powerful AI Supercomputer

Luminous Computing reports that the group has raised $105M with participation from investors including Gigafund, ex-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, 8090 Partners, Neo, Third Kind Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Strawberry Creek Ventures, Horsley Bridge, Modern Venture Partners, and many more.

At Gigafund, we focus only on founders that we believe have a path to building the most significant companies in the world. If we can build the product AI customers have always dreamed of, but wasn’t possible, Luminous will dominate the future of computing.

— Luke Nosek, managing partner, Gigafund

Silicon Valley companies are on the verge of such high advancements in technology, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. Advances such as limiting car accidents with self-driving automobiles, catching and remedying diseases through highly personalized drug discovery and computerized health analytics, permitting any user to query a complete database of the entirety of human knowledge, and allowing people to talk to computers effortlessly simultaneously.

However, the world is still a long way from seeing these applications in standard usage. AI companies understand how to provide these abilities from an algorithmic viewpoint, but more Computing, bandwidth, and memory are still in high demand. Luminous realizes this need and builds a supercomputer that satisfies those significant life-saving demands.

It’s an incredible time to be a part of the AI industry. AI has become superhuman. 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. What’s frustrating is that we have the software to address monumental, revolutionary problems that humans can’t even begin to solve. We just don’t have the hardware that can run those algorithms.

Marcus Gomez, CEO and co-founder, Luminous

Luminous' core differentiation comes from the fact that it is creating almost every aspect of the stack from inception, incorporating expertise from various professions. Mainly, Luminous is energetically recruiting photonics designers, digital and analog VLSI engineers, packaging and system integration engineers, and machine learning experts. The recent funding will primarily go towards increasing the size of the Luminous engineering team by double constructing out Luminous' customized chips and applications, preparing for commercial-scale production.

Most people who build hardware assume that in order to improve performance, you have to trade off against programmability and cost-efficiency, or just go to a higher-density silicon node. By introducing silicon photonics technology at the heart of computer architecture, we’re not only able to drastically improve performance and scalability, but we’re also able to make it much easier to build huge AI models.

Luminous Computing plans to use self-proprietary silicon photonics technology to eradicate data movement bottlenecks on a broad scale. Also, the company is re-imagining how AI computers are developed, resulting in order-of-magnitude improvements in performance and drastic simplifications to the programming model

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