Lightmatter
This company is in the pipeline of America 2030, IPO CLUB’s $50M, actively managed secondary fund focused on U.S. defense, energy, security and AI.
Year Founded: 2017
Office Locations: Mountain View, CA; Boston, MA; Toronto, Canada (expansion in 2024–2025)
Estimated Employee Count: 100–200 (2024–2025)
Business Status: Revenue Generating, Sales of photonic hardware (Envise, Passage), software (Idiom), and partnerships with data center/cloud providers.
Industry Sectors: Enterprise Technology & Data Centers, AI-Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, High Performance Computing, Telecommunications & Networking.
Short Description
Founded in 2017 by MIT alumni Nicholas Harris (CEO), Darius Bunandar (Chief Scientist), and Thomas Graham (former COO & CFO), Lightmatter is headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company specializes in developing photonic computing technologies aimed at enhancing data center performance, particularly for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Lightmatter is a photonic computing company developing advanced optical chips and interconnects to accelerate AI workloads and reduce energy use in data centers. Lightmatter's mission is to revolutionize computing by leveraging photonics—using light instead of electrical signals—for data processing and communication. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of traditional electronic systems, offering significant improvements in speed and energy efficiency, especially crucial for AI workloads and data-intensive applications.
What is it?
A privately held deep-tech startup specializing in silicon photonics hardware and software for high-performance AI and machine learning computing. According to Founder CEO Nicholas Harris, “With photonics, you can perform multiple calculations at the same time because the data is coming in on different colors of light. In one color, you could have a photo of a dog. In another color, you could have a photo of a cat. In another color, maybe a tree, and you could have all three of those operations going through the same optical computing unit, this matrix accelerator, at the same time. That drives up operations per area, and it reuses the hardware that's there, driving up energy efficiency.”
What do they do?
Key Products and Technologies
Envise: An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that utilizes optical computing to accelerate the training of large language models (LLMs). Envise is engineered to handle complex AI workloads more efficiently than conventional electronic processors.
Passage: A 3D-stacked silicon photonics engine providing high-bandwidth optical interconnects, facilitating seamless communication between multiple processors within AI data centers. Passage supports data transfer rates ranging from tens to hundreds of terabits per second, effectively addressing bottlenecks associated with traditional copper interconnects.
Idiom: A software solution designed to seamlessly integrate machine learning models onto Lightmatter's hardware, simplifying the deployment of AI applications.
Lightmatter is in the pipeline of America 2030, IPO CLUB’s $50M, actively managed secondary fund focused on U.S. defense, energy, security and AI.
How can you invest?
Lightmatter is part of our America 2030 pipeline. Find out more
Lightmatter Stock
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Industry Sectors
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Lightmatter’s Envise photonic AI accelerator is specifically designed to train and run large language models (LLMs) and other AI workloads more efficiently than conventional silicon chips. Early access partnerships with major AI labs and cloud service providers are positioning Envise as a platform for next-gen AI model training and inference.
Semiconductor Hardware
Lightmatter develops its own integrated photonic chips and collaborates with leading semiconductor foundries like GlobalFoundries for fabrication, aiming to commercialize photonic-electronic hybrid processors at scale for the semiconductor industry.
Data Centers
Lightmatter’s Passage interconnect platform is engineered to solve bandwidth and energy bottlenecks in hyperscale data centers, enabling optical networking between AI accelerators at speeds from tens to hundreds of terabits per second. The product is currently being tested with top data center operators for future deployments.
Photonic Computing
Lightmatter is pioneering the commercial use of photonic computing, with Envise representing one of the world’s first practical photonic processors available to enterprise customers for AI workloads, rather than just in research labs. This sets a benchmark for the adoption of light-based computing at commercial scale.
Cloud Infrastructure
By partnering with cloud hyperscalers and providing hardware that is compatible with existing machine learning frameworks (via the Idiom software stack), Lightmatter intends for its photonic chips to power the next generation of cloud-based AI services, with prototypes already tested in cloud environments.
Energy/Efficiency
As of 2024, a 16-chip Envise server blade consumes three kilowatts of power, reducing energy usage by 54% compared to equivalent NVIDIA A100-based systems consuming 6.5 kilowatts. Each chip provides 6.4 Tbps of optical interconnect for multi-server scale-out, 1TB of DDR4 DRAM, and 3TB of solid-state memory.
Major Investors
Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Shield Capital, Valro Equity Partners, 8VC, M12
Latest Financing Round
Series D (Oct 2024): $400 million, post-money valuation of $4.4 billion.
Lightmatter Notable Investors
T. Rowe Price, Google Ventures, Fidelity, Matrix Partners, Lockheed Martin
Lightmatter IPO
As of April 2025, Armada.ai has not filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) and remains a privately held company.
Pre-IPO Investing: For those interested in investing in Armada before an IPO, options include investing through ipo.club, which caters to accredited, qualified and institutional investors.
Lightmatter introduces two cutting-edge solutions: the L200 and the Passage M series.
Latest updates from Lightmatter and AMERICA 2030
This company is in the pipeline of America 2030, IPO CLUB’s $50M, actively managed secondary fund focused on U.S. defense, energy, security, and AI.
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