A theoretical physicist believes he has made a breakthrough in photonics research that will enable us to have faster and better processors — a major need in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other tech with heavy workloads. Now, his startup has received early backing from NATO, the European government, and other key investors to produce those chips.
Ephos has raised $8.5 million in seed funding that it will use to build out and operate a new R&D and manufacturing facility near Milan focused on glass-based quantum photonics.
There are others like Ephos with bight ideas about photonics, including Xanadu (valued at $1 billion), Photonic (backed by Microsoft), Oxford spinout Orca (backed by the U.S. DoD) and more. But Ephos, with its focus on chips, says that its facility will be the “world’s first dedicated to producing glass-based quantum photonic circuits.”
Andrea Rocchetto, the Italian theoretical physicist who is the CEO of Ephos (pictured here) said he came up with the idea for building Ephos and establishing it in Italy at the peak of Covid-19.
After studies in Rome, London, and Oxford, he was working on postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin when the pandemic struck.
“I flew back to Italy and reconnected with the community here and realized that there was this immense talent pool that was completely outside of the big trends in technology,” he said. “There were no startups building quantum technologies.” He linked up with with three other highlydecorated quantum and computer science researchers — Francesco Ceccarelli, Giacomo Corrielli and Roberto Osellame — in 2022 and started Ephos to fill that void.
As Rocchetto sees it, that void is not just a geographic but a technological one.
Computational infrastructure, as we know by the huge revenues reaped by companies like Nvidia and the large bills that big foundational AI companies rack up for training and running models, is under stress. But it’s not just AI. New innovations like quantum computing are also putting pressure on the hardware we have today. In the U.S. alone, Rocchetto said, about 9% of the energy generated in the U.S. will be used for running data centers, so the demand is to get them to be faster and more efficient. “Photonics and quantum computing can both answer those needs,” he said.
Using chips that process light — photons, specifically — is one very efficient way to transfer data, and Ephos’s bet is that building photonics chips using (glass) fiber optics will be the best base for these and the least likely to result in photon loss. “Glass helps a lot for that,” he said. “The chips of our competitors are silicon-made, but light hates to move from one material into another. By building the entire infrastructure on glass, we can dramatically reduce those coupling losses between fibers and chips.”
Ephos has one leg in the world of deep tech, and one in the world of commercialized opportunity. Its quantum facility is already open — some of the funding was actually raised earlier in the year — but the first chips have yet to be made. These should come out in the next weeks, however, “and we expect the fab to be fully operational by the end of the year,” Rocchetto said.
Early interest has been from quantum computing startups, but he added that the startup is also seeing interest from so-called “hyperscalers,” big tech companies that build their own data centers, and the data center builders who work with them. The list of those investing are an interesting clue as to who some of those hyperscalers might be.
Starlight Ventures out of the U.S. is leading the round with Collaborative Fund, Exor Ventures, 2100 Ventures, and Unruly Capital also participating. Angels in the round include Simone Severini (Amazon Web Services’ GM overseeing quantum technologies), Diego Piacentini (formerly a senior VP at Amazon), and Joe Zadeh (former VP of Airbnb). Ephos is also getting backing from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator (also known as DIANA).
The fact that Ephos is in Europe is not a small detail. There has been a big push across the world for regions to double down on more of their own infrastructure across a range of verticals amid geopolitcal and macroeconomic instability — collectively referred to as “resilience”. In this case, Ephos is also getting backing from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator (also known as DIANA).
While Ephos sees its primary opportunity as one of addressing a need in computing, “As a company, we are very much interested in building transatlantic ties,” said Rocchetto. “We very much believe defense is a critical area for the growth of our company, because historically, the defense sector has been one of the first buyers of new computational technology. So we keep a close eye on the space.”