Photonic chip company Q.ANT has raised €62 million ($72m) in a Series A funding round.

Co-led by Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners, and imec.xpand, and with participation from Verve Ventures, Onsight Ventures, and TRUMPF, amongst others, the company said the funds would be used to accelerate the commercialization of its photonic processors for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC).

The company also plans to expand into the US and grow its team across disciplines, and has additionally appointed Hermann Hauser, founder of Arm, and Hermann Eul, former member of the Infineon management board and former CVP and GM of Intel, to its board.

Based in Stuttgart, Germany, and founded in 2018 as a spin-off from TRUMPF, Q.ANT has been developing photonic chips built on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate.

The company says its Q.ANT Native Processing Server (NPS) integrates “seamlessly” into data centers as a plug-in co-processor, and claims the hardware can offer up to 30x energy efficiency and 50x performance improvement, with the potential to increase data center capacity 100x without the need for “complex active cooling systems.”

“Q.ANT was founded with a bold vision: to redefine the way the world computes by using light instead of electricity,” said Dr. Michael Förtsch, founder and CEO of Q.ANT. “This investment proves that Europe has both the ambition and the capital to lead – and gives us the strong partners we need to pursue our mission and help shape the future of computing.”

Also this week, Q.ANT announced it would be delivering its NPS to the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany. The company says this will be the first-ever deployment of an analog photonic co-processor in a live HPC environment and will support research into hybrid digital-analog architectures for future HPC environments, a project being funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space.

LRZ will use the Q.ANT NPS to establish new benchmarks and real-world use cases for applications such as climate modeling, real-time medical imaging, or materials simulation for fusion research.

“Photonic processors offer a novel and promising path to accelerate AI and simulation workloads, while sharply reducing our environmental footprint. This deployment marks a milestone in our future computing mission to advance energy-efficient AI and high-performance computing,” said Professor Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller, chairman of the board of directors of LRZ.

“Q.ANT’s NPS integrates easily into our existing infrastructure, allowing us to immediately evaluate its performance. Bringing in future technologies and opening up new avenues for our users would, however, not be possible without the continuous support from both the federal and Bavarian governments.”