Celestical AI Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has raised $56 million in its Series A to create a novel photonic-electronic based artificial intelligence chipset.

The company, founded in 2020, is a machine learning (ML) accelerator company that has developed a proprietary photonic fabric that uses light for data movement both within and between chips.

The Series A investment was led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) with participation from Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund; The Engine, a venture firm spun out of MIT, Tyche Partners, M Ventures and IMEC Xpand.

Celestial said the money would be used to expand the engineering team and build the Orion AI accelerator products.

Light makes software simpler

Celestial AI’s photonic fabric enables optically addressable memory. The use of photonics allows for an efficient mapping of data and compute without the need for complex optimizations and simplifies software.

“We are addressing the problem of our time in computing – efficient data movement,” said Celestial AI founder and CEO David Lazovsky, in a statement. “Celestial AI’s hybrid photonic-electronic platform allows us to leverage the complementary strengths of electronics for high-performance, high-precision computing and photonics for high-speed, low-power, high-bandwidth data movement. The ML application benefits extend beyond performance and low power to latency, user friendly software, and low total cost of ownership.”