US-based AI company Altair leads seed funding for technology startup Xscape Photonics with $10 million investment

• The startup connects various computing elements for high-speed data transfer in an environmentally sustainable way.
  
• As a part of the investment, James R. Scapa, founder and chief executive officer, Altair, will assume a seat in the startup’s board of directors.
  
• The use of photonics helps in reducing power consumption and heat production while increasing the speed and power of communications, claims Xscape.

Altair, a computational science and artificial intelligence (AI) company, has invested $10 million in Xscape Photonics - a startup which developed patented technology for photonic chips for ultrahigh-bandwidth connections inside data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

Xscape claims to have developed a platform that connects various computing elements in an environmentally sustainable way by using photonics. The use of photonics helps in reducing power consumption and heat production while increasing the speed and power of communications, according to Xscape.

Xscape Photonics is led by Columbia University professors and world leading researchers in photonic, namely, professors Alexander Gaeta, Keren Bergman and Michal Lipson, along with Yoshi Okawachi, research scientist at Columbia University and Vivek Raghunathan, senior principal engineer who led Intel’s First SiPh Product Ramp.

“We are proud to reinvent the future of computing by developing the most energy-efficient, high-bandwidth, and high-performance photonics technology that can scale in a sustainable way while meeting the demands of the future,” said Gaeta.

As a part of the investment, James R. Scapa, founder and chief executive officer, Altair, will assume a seat in the startup’s board of directors and Altair will also secure a seat on the board of observers.

“This investment and collaboration with some of the world’s best innovators in photonics will allow us to stay at the cutting edge of such high-fidelity and advanced technologies that will help our customers solve their problems more efficiently as they look to the next generation of hardware,” said Scapa

The company also added that photonics has significant potential for high-speed data transfer, which is relevant for software that facilitates simulation, HPC, AI, and machine learning.

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