French DeepTech company Arago raises €22.1 million to slash AI energy consumption with photonic chip

Arago, a Paris-based DeepTech startup pioneering a new class of energy-efficient AI chips powered by light, has raised €22.1 million in Seed funding to accelerate the commercialisation of its photonic processor, codenamed “JEF”.

The oversubscribed round was co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow, with participation from Generative IQ and C4 Ventures, among others. The round also includes investment from angel investors, including Bertrand Serlet (former VP at Apple and Co-founder of Fungible), Christophe Frey (GM at Arm), Olivier Pomel (Co-founder of Datadog), Thomas Wolf (Co-founder of Hugging Face), and Jack Abraham (Co-founder of Exowatt), among others.

Nicolas Muller, Arago’s CEO and Co-founder, said: “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. 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.”

Founded less than a year ago by Nicolas Muller, Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller – whose combined expertise spans photonics, electronics, software, mathematics and machine learning – Arago is an AI and computer hardware company developing an energy-efficient AI chip powered by light.

Arago’s proprietary technology is designed to reportedly deliver 10× lower energy consumption than today’s leading GPUs at equivalent compute performance and cost while remaining fully compatible with industry-standard software frameworks and hardware components.

Arago has assembled a team of 20 engineers, scientists, and operators from leading companies and universities, and is backed by executives from Apple, Arm, Nvidia, and Hugging Face, along with prominent DeepTech venture firms.

“Innovation in computing is one of the hardest DeepTech challenges,” added Thong Le Hoang, Co-founder of Visionaries Tomorrow. “Arago’s superpower lies in its first-principles vision of the future, combined with a deep understanding across digital, analog, and photonic approaches. The result is a unique hybrid architecture built on the latest industry breakthroughs and engineered to deliver step-change performance gains in the near term.”

According to the company, the surge in AI adoption has led to exponential – and unsustainable – growth in energy consumption.

Arago’s mission is to radically rethink AI’s compute infrastructure so that the technology can have a viable future for everyone.

Pierre Boudier, former Nvidia Fellow and Lead GPU Architect at Intel, said: “I’ve worked with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for nearly a decade. I know what it takes to succeed in this industry, and I see a lot of those same qualities in the Arago team.”

At the heart of their photonic processor “JEF” is a proprietary photonic technology: instead of transistors, it uses lasers to process data with photons – particles of light that generate far less heat than electrons in conventional processors. By harnessing these inherent advantages, the chip is designed to deliver lower energy consumption than today’s leading GPUs at equivalent performance and cost.

Early results allegedly 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.

It also sidesteps the technical barriers that have historically limited the performance of photonic and GPU-alternative processors – as per Arago.

“Arago is creating a ‘DeepSeek moment’ for AI chips,” said Earlybird Co-founder Hendrik Brandis. “This technology has the potential to defy the laws of AI compute, using only a fraction of the resources. The Arago team is executing towards this moment with unseen velocity and frugality.”

Arago will use its funding to accelerate product development toward commercialisation, grow its team across France, North America, and Israel, and deepen business partnerships to scale its growth.

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