Israeli Supercomputer Creators Awarded €12.5 Million By EU Fund  

The Israeli creators of a computer that uses lasers to carry out complex tasks at the speed of light have been awarded a total of €12.5 million from the European Innovation Council (EIC). 

LightSolver‘s supercomputer is the creation of the company’s CEO Dr. Ruti Ben Shlomi and CTO Dr. Chene Tradonsky, physicists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. 

The EIC, which is branch of the European Union aimed at supporting researchers in innovations, will provide LightSolver with an initial grant of €2.5 million, which will be followed by a future equity investment of €10 million. The company was among just 68 chosen from almost 1,000 applicants.

The company says it will use the grant to advance the commercialization of its platform and accelerate its growth in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector.

“We’re humbled to join the rows of trailblazing startups in fields such as sustainability, MedTech, and space technology that have received funding from the EIC,” said Ben Shlomi. 

“The amount of energy consumed by computing globally has been growing exponentially and is becoming unsustainable, hence the need for a new computing paradigm. Our laser-based processor can tackle large and complex computations faster than GPUs. It is also much less environmentally demanding than quantum computers, requiring no vacuum or ultracold temperatures which means that it can live in a data center.”