The archive · Hardware & Devices · Technical decision · 2024–2025
Arago bets light-powered chip JEF cuts AI energy 10x, stays GPU-compatible
Paris deep-tech startup builds hybrid photonic chip 'JEF' claiming 10x lower AI energy with GPU compatibility; $26M oversubscribed seed, July 2025.
Arago
What the business is
Arago is a fabless deep-tech startup building 'JEF', a multiphysics AI inference processor that combines analog and digital electronics, silicon photonics and free-space optics; it claims GPU-level performance at up to 10x lower energy while running standard AI frameworks.
Starting capital：$26M (€22.1M) oversubscribed seed, co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow with Generative IQ, C4 Ventures and angels including Bertrand Serlet, Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) and Jack Abraham; announced 2025-07-07.
How it started
Arago was founded in Paris less than a year before its July 2025 announcement by Nicolas Muller (CEO) with Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller — physics and AI researchers who met at a maker space, with Sarrey and Müller having worked on silicon photonics and AI algorithm development at ETH Zürich. They started from the top-down question of what it takes to infer a model very efficiently, then wrote the datasheet for a product; Muller argues the timing only became possible because key components and processes matured about one to two years earlier.
What happened
Arago built a ~20-person team across France, the UK, the US and Israel, half of it on software, and got a JEF test chip running AI inference for multiple models on a small card. In July 2025 it closed an oversubscribed $26M seed co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow, with Generative IQ, C4 Ventures and angels including former Apple VP Bertrand Serlet, Datadog co-founder Olivier Pomel, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Exowatt co-founder Jack Abraham; Earlybird called the architecture a potential 'DeepSeek moment' for AI chips. The round funds development of a data-center inference accelerator, with edge and robotics applications later, and the team is fabless, relying on mature processes rather than a new manufacturing line.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Arago is a Paris-based fabless chip startup founded less than a year before July 2025 by Nicolas Muller, Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller, who met at a maker space and came from physics and AI research rather than photonics. It is building JEF, an inference processor that mixes analog and digital electronics, silicon photonics and free-space optics to run AI models at up to 10x lower energy than leading GPUs.
The founders argue that past photonic-computing startups, such as Lightmatter, Lightelligence, Salience and Lumai, were born in a different technical landscape, and that the historical failure mode was integration. Arago's answer is to use optics only at very specific places, combine them with classical silicon processes that are already mature, and stay fabless — so the chip can be manufactured with current processes and adopted by today's data centers.
Half of Arago's ~20-person team works on software so developers can access JEF through a single command-line change with no new language; early results reportedly run AI models from industry-standard frameworks. In July 2025 the startup announced an oversubscribed $26M seed co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow, with participation from Generative IQ, C4 Ventures and angels including Bertrand Serlet, Olivier Pomel, Thomas Wolf and Jack Abraham.
A JEF test chip was already running AI inference for multiple models at the time of the announcement, and the target product is a data-center inference accelerator, with edge and robotics applications later. As of 2026-09-02 there is no shipped commercial product or public customer — the 10x claim remains company-reported until the chip performs at datasheet level in real deployments.
What has to be true
- Inference energy is becoming the binding constraint on AI scale, and photons generate far less heat than electrons — a physics-level advantage over GPU roadmaps.
- Past photonic attempts failed on integration, not physics; Arago limits optics to specific places and reuses mature silicon processes to stay manufacturable.
- Drop-in compatibility is the adoption strategy: no new language, one-line software change, standard frameworks — the ecosystem does not have to adapt.
- The timing claim is testable: components became mature and cost-effective only one to two years before founding, and the team got a test chip running inference within its first year.
What can be applied
In deep tech, compatibility is the wedge: the hardest part is not the new physics but today's software, manufacturing and deployment — design for the ecosystem that exists, not the one you hope for.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-02 Arago is in development with no commercial product or announced customers, building the JEF processor and software stack across hubs in France, the UK, the US and Israel. Claimed early results (GPU-level performance at up to 10x lower energy on standard frameworks) come from the company and investors and are not yet independently benchmarked. The open questions are whether a hybrid photonic chip can reach datasheet performance, cost and reliability at data-center scale, and how it fares against incumbents and photonic rivals like Lightmatter.
Sources
- Arago raises $26M to slash AI energy consumption with breakthrough photonic chip
- French Startup Combines Electronics, Photonics And Optics For AI
- Founded & Funded: 2025-Q3 Portfolio News
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