AI photonic chip startup Neurophos has raised $110 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round.

Led by Gates Frontier, the round also saw investments from M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Carbon Direct Capital, Aramco Ventures, Bosch Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, and Space Capital.

It brings the total raised by the company to $118m. The additional funding will be used to accelerate the delivery of its first integrated photonic compute system, which will include data center-ready OPU modules, a full software stack, and early-access developer hardware. Neurophos is also planning to expand its headquarters in Austin and open a San Francisco engineering site.

Neurophos was founded in 2020 and has developed a proprietary optical processing unit (OPU) that integrates more than one million micron-scale optical processing elements on a single chip.

The startup claims its new class of accelerator contains “micron-scale metamaterial optical modulators,” which are 10,000x smaller than previous photonic elements, thus making large-scale, manufacturable photonic computing possible for the first time.

By enabling significant reductions in power consumption, Neurophos says its OPU can support the next generation of AI infrastructure without the need for massive increases in energy or physical resources, making the technology “more accessible and cost-effective.”

“Moore’s Law is slowing, but AI can’t afford to wait. Our breakthrough in photonics unlocks an entirely new dimension of scaling, by packing massive optical parallelism on a single chip,” says Dr. Patrick Bowen, CEO and co-founder of Neurophos. “This physics-level shift means both efficiency and raw speed improve as we scale up, breaking free from the power walls that constrain traditional GPUs.”