German photonics startup Akhetonics has raised €6 million ($6.33m) in a seed funding round.

First reported by TechCrunch, the round was led by Matterwave Ventures and follows a €2.3m ($2.4m) raise closed by the company in July 2024.

Founded in 2021, Akhetonics is working on the development of an optical general-purpose processor to solve two of the biggest problems currently facing AI and HPC hardware; the memory bottleneck and energy inefficiency.

By using light instead of electrons to process and store data, the company says its chips will be much faster and more energy efficient than electronic processors, reducing the cooling and power requirements of servers while also lowering application latency.

According to Akhetonics, its ultimate goal is to have its optical cross-domain processing unit – also known as an XPU – combine analog, digital, and quantum computing principles on a single platform.

Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, the company says its chips are built using a “purely European supply chain, from fabrication to packaging.”

Akhetonics plans to use the latest funding to expand its workforce and support the commercialization of its forthcoming product, which it aims to demonstrate a full prototype of by 2026.