Lumai

Lumai manufactures optical computing systems designed for AI inference workloads, offering a fundamentally different approach to AI acceleration that uses 3D optical components instead of relying solely on silicon-based transistor technology. The company's Lumai Iris platform is the world's first optical computing system capable of running billion-parameter LLMs in real time, demonstrated with models like Llama. By computing in 3D volume rather than on 2D chips, Lumai achieves massive spatial parallelism that enables millions of operations per cycle. The platform delivers a projected 50x increase in AI performance compared to transistor-only accelerators, reduces total cost of ownership to approximately 10% of conventional solutions, and achieves 90% reduction in power consumption with no liquid cooling required. The architecture features a three-tier memory system optimized for efficient KV Cache access, hardware-aware quantization schemes with optical constraints for robust inference, and extremely wide interfaces for high data throughput. Built on industry-standard manufacturing processes requiring no new materials, Lumai is designed for hyperscale data center integration and long-term scaling. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Oxford, United Kingdom, Lumai has raised approximately $12.4 million in a Series A round backed by Constructor Capital, IP Group, PhotonVentures, Journey Venture, LIFTT, Qubits Ventures, State Farm, TIS, Runa Capital, and UKRI.