Arago, a deeptech startup pioneering a new class of energy-efficient AI chips powered by light, has raised $26 million in seed funding to accelerate the commercialisation of its photonic processor, codenamed “JEF”.
At the core of “JEF” is a proprietary photonic technology that processes data using lasers instead of transistors. By using photons, light particles that generate much less heat than electrons, this chip can deliver the same performance as top GPUs while consuming 10× less energy and maintaining comparable cost.
Early results demonstrate that “JEF” can run AI models from industry-standard software frameworks while staying fully compatible with the existing AI ecosystem, compute infrastructure, and manufacturing processes. It also sidesteps the technical barriers that have historically limited the performance of photonic and GPU-alternative processors.
Nicolas Muller, Arago’s CEO and co-founder, said:
To build a product that’s not only high-performing but also truly usable, it’s critical to deeply understand the constraints of integrating a component based on a different compute principle into the broader ecosystem. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for the ecosystem to adapt – our technology needs to be compatible with everything from manufacturing processes to the AI software stack from day one.
Thong Le Hoang, co-founder of Visionaries Tomorrow, highlights that innovation in computing is one of the hardest deeptech challenges, adding:
Arago’s superpower lies in its first-principles vision of the future, combined with a deep understanding across digital, analog, and photonic approaches. The result is a unique hybrid architecture built on the latest industry breakthroughs and engineered to deliver step-change performance gains in the near term.
Founded less than a year ago by Nicolas Muller, Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller, whose combined expertise spans photonics, electronics, software, mathematics and machine learning, Arago has assembled a lean team of 20 experts from the world’s leading tech companies and research labs.
The oversubscribed seed round was co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow, with participation from Generative IQ and C4 Ventures, among others. The round also includes investment from prominent angel investors, including Bertrand Serlet (former VP at Apple and co-founder of Fungible), Christophe Frey (GM at Arm), Olivier Pomel (co-founder of Datadog), Thomas Wolf (co-founder of Hugging Face), and Jack Abraham (co-founder of Exowatt), among others.
Earlybird co-founder Hendrik Brandis shared:
Arago is creating a ‘DeepSeek moment’ for AI chips. This technology has the potential to defy the laws of AI compute, using only a fraction of the resources. The Arago team is executing towards this moment with unseen velocity and frugality.
Arago will use its funding to accelerate product development for commercialisation, grow the team across multiple development sites, and deepen business partnerships.
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