BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 11, 2025 — Opticore, developer of patented optical processing units (OPUs) targeting optical computing, has secured $7.5 million in additional funding to accelerate the development of its technology. The funding builds on the company’s pre-seed round last year to bring its total funding up to $14.5 million.

Opticore is building a next-generation photonic computing chip that it said is up to 100x more energy efficient and offers 25× the computing density compared to leading GPUs. The company’s technology is built with exclusive patents based on academic work from co-founder Ryan Hamerly and advisor Dirk Englund published in 2019.

“Our photonic computing architecture isn't constrained by Moore's Law and can achieve world-class performance while consuming a fraction of the energy budget,” said company co-founder and CEO Zaijun Chen. “We envision a future where data centers won't need their own power plants, and the heaviest compute workloads can be offloaded to photonic processors, shaping the multi-trillion-dollar AI infrastructure buildout.”

Opticore's approach leverages time-multiplexed computing to encode 1 trillion parameters on a single chip while achieving 100 TOPS/W compute efficiency through parallel computation. Unlike other optical approaches with high energy overhead and limited scalability, Opticore uses dynamic weights for real-time training and inference. The technology is compatible with standard foundry processes.

Following successful demonstration tapeouts this year, the company said, Opticore expects to have its first scaled system demonstration in 2026.

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There are 40 suppliers of Photonic Integrated Circuits in the Photonics Marketplace.

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