Arago押注光动力芯片，JEF将AI能耗降低10倍，且兼容GPU

做的是什么生意

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.

启动资金：$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.

起因

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.

经过

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.

可借鉴之处

在深度科技领域，兼容性是突破口：最难的并非新物理，而是现有软件、制造和部署——为实际存在的生态系统设计，而不是为你希望存在的设计。