Opticore Ai

About Opticore Ai

Opticore Ai, a photonic computing company founded in 2023, is focused on developing next-generation processing units to address the escalating energy consumption of data centers and artificial intelligence. The company was co-founded by a team of scientists with backgrounds from MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley: Zaijun Chen, Mengjie Yu, and Ryan Hamerly. Their collective expertise in photonics, quantum optics, and electrical engineering underpins the company's core technology, which originated from research demonstrating a computing system with significantly higher energy efficiency and area density.

The firm is engineering Optical Processing Units (OPUs) that compute using light and waveguides instead of traditional electrical components. This approach is designed to overcome the memory bottlenecks inherent in CMOS electronics and perform computational tasks at a fraction of the energy cost and with higher clock speeds compared to current GPUs. The company's patented architecture utilizes time-multiplexed computing, which could allow a single chip to encode a trillion parameters while achieving substantial compute efficiency through parallel computation. A key benefit is the use of dynamic weights, enabling the same chip to be used for both AI model training and real-time inference.

Opticore Ai operates in the semiconductor market, specifically targeting the high-performance computing needs of the AI industry. Its business model appears to be centered on the design and eventual sale of these specialized photonic chips to clients operating large-scale data centers and AI infrastructure. The technology is being developed to be compatible with standard semiconductor foundry processes, which would facilitate scalable commercial production. The company has secured significant seed funding to advance its technology, raising a total of $14.5 million over two rounds. The initial $5 million round in December 2024 was followed by a $7.5 million round in September 2025, with participation from deep-tech and climate-focused investors like Jetha Global, Sagax Capital, Origin Ventures, and Neotribe Ventures.