Arago raises $26M to slash AI energy consumption with new photonic chip
The heart of Arago's processor, codenamed “JEF,” is a proprietary photonic technology: instead of transistors, it uses lasers to process data with photons. The chip is designed to deliver 10× lower energy consumption than today’s leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost.
Arago, a Paris and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup pioneering a new class of energy-efficient AI chips powered by light, has raised USD 26 million in seed funding to accelerate the commercialization of its photonic processor, codenamed “JEF”.
The heart of “JEF” is a proprietary photonic technology: instead of transistors, it uses lasers to process data with photons – particles of light that generate far less heat than electrons in conventional processors. By harnessing these inherent advantages, the chip is designed to deliver 10× lower energy consumption than today’s leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost, Arago said in a media release.
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.
“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,” Nicolas Muller, Arago’s CEO and co-founder, said. “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.”
“Arago’s superpower lies in its first-principles vision of the future, combined with a deep understanding across digital, analog, and photonic approaches,” said Thong Le Hoang, co-founder of Visionaries Tomorrow. “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.”
The oversubscribed USD 26 million 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 across the semiconductor, AI, and software industries, 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.
“Arago is creating a ‘DeepSeek moment’ for AI chips,” said Earlybird co-founder Hendrik Brandis. “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 said it would use its funding to accelerate product development toward commercialization, grow its team across France, North America, and Israel, and deepen business partnerships to scale its growth.