Computing startup LightSolver has been selected for the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Program. The company will receive an initial grant of €2.5 million from the EIC Fund combined with a future equity investment of €10 million, totaling €12.5M. This recognition places LightSolver among 68 companies chosen from a highly competitive pool of 969 applicants.

The funding has been committed for the first all-optical supercomputer that is more energy-efficient than classical computers, in a bid to reduce the industrial carbon footprint and the Total Cost of Computing (TCoC). The company will leverage the resources granted by the EIC to advance the commercialization of its platform and accelerate its growth in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector.

 LightSolver’s processor, the Laser Processing Unit™ (LPU), harnesses the natural properties of light to execute complex mathematical operations, enabling industry and research to process compute-intensive workloads in a rapid and energy-efficient way. Applications such as computer-assisted engineering (CAE), bio-science computations, and intractable optimization problems are amongst the workloads that can be greatly accelerated by LightSolver’s platform.

“We’re humbled to join the rows of trailblazing startups in fields such as sustainability, MedTech, and space technology that have received funding from the EIC,” said LightSolver CEO and co-founder Ruti Ben-Shlomi, Ph.D. “The amount of energy consumed by computing globally has been growing exponentially and is becoming unsustainable, hence the need for a new computing paradigm. Our laser-based processor can tackle large and complex computations faster than GPUs. It is also much less environmentally demanding than quantum computers, requiring no vacuum or ultracold temperatures which means that it can live in a data center.”

The European Innovation Council (EIC) is an initiative by the European Commission to support high-potential startups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and researchers in developing and scaling breakthrough innovations. Launched to drive Europe’s leadership in new technologies and innovation, the EIC aims to identify, support, and invest in the most promising innovative projects across various sectors, including computing, energy, telecom, pharmaceutical and medicine.