The French start-up has convinced several funds and business angels of the potential of its owner technology.
What if the future of AI went through the light? This is in any case what Arago believes, a young French start-up founded less than a year ago by Nicolas Muller and Eliott Sarrey, both graduates of MIT, and Ambroise Müller, expert in theoretical physics trained in Polytechnique. And they are obviously not the only ones to think because the company announces this July 8, raising $ 26 million from the Earlybird, Protagonist, Visionarories and Tomorrow funds. Several notable personalities of the Tech ecosystem also participate in the Tour de Table, including Bertrand Serlet (former Vice-President of Apple), Christophe Frey (Director General at Arm), Olivier Pomel (Co-founder of Datadog), Thomas Wolf (co-founder of Hugging Face) and Pierre Boudier, former Nvidia.
Owner technology
What does Arago offer? To understand this, it should be remembered that current GPUs, used to infer AI models, consume colossal amounts of energy due to their operations based on electrons. When they cross transistors the electrons generate a lot of heat (principle of resistance). Consequence: data centers are forced to deploy massive cooling systems that still amplify electricity consumption.
Arago has chosen to change the traditional approach by replacing the electrons with photons, particles of light. Unlike the electrons that generate heat by crossing the material, the photons move without resistance and produce practically no heat. The French start-up has developed owner photonics technology that uses lasers to process data, thus making it possible to maintain the same calculation performance while drastically reducing energy consumption.
Reduction of electricity consumption
Named “Jef”, the chip promises to divide energy consumption from current GPUs by 10, while maintaining equivalent performance and costs. Unlike other alternative solutions to GPUs which often require complex software adaptations, the Arago chip can directly execute existing AI models without modification. Companies who wish to use it therefore do not need to rewrite their code or change their development tools.
The funds raised will serve to accelerate product development towards its marketing, to enlarge the Arago teams and to sign commercial partnerships to support growth. It remains to be seen if the photonic approach will enlighten the sector.
