Bill Gates Backs Luminous Computing

<p><strong>MOUNTAIN VIEW<&sol;strong> &&num;8212&semi; Luminous Computing has raised &dollar;105 million in a Series A round&comma; with participation from investors including Gigafund&comma; Microsoft founder Bill Gates&comma; 8090 Partners&comma; Neo&comma; Third Kind Venture Capital&comma; Alumni Ventures Group&comma; Strawberry Creek Ventures&comma; Horsley Bridge&comma; Modern Venture Partners&comma; and others&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Luminous is trying to build the world&&num;8217&semi;s most powerful AI supercomputer&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;It’s an incredible time to be a part of the AI industry&comma;” said Marcus Gomez&comma; CEO and co-founder&comma; Luminous&period; &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;AI has become superhuman&period; We can interact with computers in natural language and ask them to write a piece of code or even an essay&comma; and the output will be better than most humans could provide&period; What’s frustrating is that we have the software to address monumental&comma; revolutionary problems that humans can’t even begin to solve&period; We just don’t have the hardware that can run those algorithms&period;”<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>The funding will primarily go towards doubling the size of the Luminous engineering team&comma; building out Luminous’ custom chips and software&comma; and gearing up for commercial-scale production&period; Specifically&comma; Luminous is actively recruiting photonics designers&comma; digital and analog VLSI engineers&comma; packaging and system integration engineers&comma; and machine learning experts&period; Luminous’ core differentiation comes from the fact that it is building nearly every part of the stack from the ground up&comma; integrating expertise from a diversity of domains&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Using proprietary silicon photonics technology to eliminate data movement bottlenecks at every scale&comma; Luminous is completely re-imagining how AI computers are built&comma; resulting not only in order-of-magnitude improvements in performance&comma; but also in drastic simplifications to the programming model&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;Most people who build hardware assume that in order to improve performance&comma; you have to trade off against programmability and cost-efficiency&comma; or just go to a higher-density silicon node&period; By introducing silicon photonics technology at the heart of computer architecture&comma; we’re not only able to drastically improve performance and scalability&comma; but we’re also able to make it much easier to build huge AI models&comma;” added Gomez&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;At Gigafund&comma; we focus only on founders that we believe have a path to building the most significant companies in the world&comma;” said Luke Nosek&comma; managing partner&comma; Gigafund&period; &OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;If we can build the product AI customers have always dreamed of&comma; but wasn’t possible&comma; Luminous will dominate the future of computing&period;”<&sol;p>&NewLine;