Neurophos, a spinout of Duke University and Metacept Inc., an incubator focused on creating metamaterials-based companies, raised $7.2 million in seed round funding to commercialize metamaterial and optical AI inference chips targeting data center applications. Neurophos plans to use its high-speed silicon photonics technology to drive a metasurface in-memory processor capable of fast, efficient, AI compute.

The funds, the company said, will be used to facilitate the production of a proprietary metasurface that serves as a tensor core processor, as well as to hire a team of engineers in Austin, Texas. According to the company, Neurophos’ metamaterial-based optical modulators are more than 1000 times smaller than those from a standard foundry process design kit, enabling over 1 million trillion operations per second. The technology combines an optical metasurface for silicon photonic computing with a compute-in-memory (CIM) processor architecture fed by high-speed silicon photonics for fast, efficient matrix-matrix multiplications, which make up the majority of operations while running a neural network.

The metasurface-enabled optical CIM elements are thousands of times smaller than traditional silicon photonics modulators, enabling the processing of vastly larger matrices on-chip. This results in an unprecedented increase in computational density, the company said.

“By leveraging metamaterials in a standard CMOS process, we have figured out how to shrink an optical processor by 8000 times, which will give us orders of magnitude improvement over GPUs today,” said Patrick Bowen, CEO of Neurophos.

Neurophos was spun out of Metacept, an incubator led by David Smith, the James B. Duke Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke, focused on creating metamaterials-based companies and collaborating with Smith’s research group at Duke. The seed round was led by Gates Frontier and supported by partners including MetaVC Partners, which provided Neurophos’ initial funding and an exclusive license to the fund’s metamaterials IP portfolio for optical computing. The company is also joining Silicon Catalyst, an incubator/accelerator focused on semiconductor technology.