French photonic chip startup Arago has closed an oversubscribed $26 million seed round.

Co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist, and Visionaries Tomorrow and with participation from Generative IQ and C4 Ventures, the round also saw investment from Bertrand Serlet (former VP at Apple), Christophe Frey (GM at Arm), and Thomas Wolf (co-founder of Hugging Face).

Founded last year by Nicolas Muller, Eliott Sarrey, and Ambroise Müller, Arago has been developing a photonic processor which the company has codenamed ‘JEF’.

The chip is developed using the company’s proprietary photonic technology, which Arago claims “sidesteps the technical barriers” that have traditionally limited the performance of photonic processors.

The chip has been designed to deliver a 10x lower energy consumption than today’s leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost, Arago said, adding that “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.”

Arago said it plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and commercialization of JEF, in addition to growing its team across multiple locations.

“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,” said co-founder and CEO Muller. “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.”