Optalysis raises £21m Series A

The company is working with Google, IBM and others on Fully Homomorphic Encryption” (FHE) which enables cloud-based processing of encrypted data and its transmission across untrusted networks. It anticipates marketing chiplet-based products using its technology in three years time.

FHE protects data while it is in use so ‘closing the last major vulnerability in cloud and remote processing’, says the company.

FHE is a quantum secure form of cryptography that preserves the structure of data even when
encrypted, allowing any computation to be performed on information stored in ciphertext form. Data is never decrypted and never exposed even to the hardware working on it.

However, the cost and complexity of FHE has made it nearly impossible to deploy at massive scale. “Optalysis has the solution,” says the company.

“We have turned optical computing on its head,” says co-founder and CEO Nick New, “what’s more, FHE is just the starting point for where our technology can go.”

Investors include Imec’s VC fund imec.xpand, Northern Gritstone, a fund formed by the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield and the Agnelli-owned $3 billion Lingotto fund where George Osborne is the non-executive chairman.

Optalysis plans to use the money to increase its headcount from 18 today, including contractors, to more than 50 in the next 12 months.