Leeds tech specialist to “revolutionise” secure computing via £21m funding

Optalysys, the developer of a “revolutionary” photonic processing technology, has announced a £21m Series A funding round led by Lingotto, imec.xpand, and Northern Gritstone, with additional investors to follow.

The investment will allow the company to advance its Enable photonic computing technology to unlock a new form of secure processing known as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).

FHE is a form of quantum-secure cryptography that closes the last vulnerability in cloud systems: unlike other encryption methods, FHE does not require the data to be decrypted before it can be processed, allowing confidential or sensitive data to be sent along untrusted networks, or to be worked on by multiple parties without ever exposing the data itself.

However, the computational burden attached to this poses significant challenges, with a single process on encrypted data taking around one million times longer than on unencrypted data, making it near impossible to deploy at scale with conventional computer processors.

Optalysys’ approach addresses this bottleneck. The company has created an advanced photonic semiconductor which accelerates the FHE process, allowing encrypted data to be processed at similar speeds to its unencrypted form. This brings hope of deploying FHE at the scale demanded by the largest secure data applications.

With potential use cases across most major industries, including finance and banking, manufacturing, healthcare and machine analytics, research firm Global Market Insights estimates that the global FHE market is set to grow to $53bn by 2030.

The goal is for Optalysys to become the “world’s leading provider” of confidential and private computing leading to the Encrypted Data Centre, where today’s trust and security issues of sending data to the cloud become consigned to history.

The investment will allow the company to launch its technology on a cloud-based service model, in partnership with system integrators and service providers. Initial photonic systems developed by Optalysys will also be made available to end-users via an Accelerator program, ahead of the first high-speed Enable chips being produced within 24 months.

The funding will also be used to expand its team in England, Europe and the US. For co-founders Dr Nick New and Robert Todd, this marks the culmination of over 20 years’ development in optical computing, during which they have relocated from Cambridge to Leeds to draw on the city’s resources and the University’s strong expertise in the field.

Dr. Nick New, co-founder and CEO of Optalysys, commented: “It is a very exciting moment for Optalysys and it’s fantastic to have the backing of such prestigious deep tech investors to help us reach our goals. We have turned optical computing on its head. What’s more, FHE is just the starting point for where our technology can go.”

By Matthew Neville – Senior Correspondent, Bdaily

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