We have advised Lingotto, owned by Exor N.V., imec.xpand, and Northern Gritstone on their investment in Optalysys, a UK chip designer's £21 million Series A funding.
Founded in 2013, Optalysys is a developer of a revolutionary photonic processing technology. It created an advanced photonic semiconductor which accelerates the Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which is a form of quantum-secure cryptography that does not require data to be decrypted before it can be processed. The accelerated FHE process allows encrypted data to be processed at similar speeds to its unencrypted form, bringing hope of deploying FHE at large scale secure data applications, such as healthcare and financial services.
The £21 million Series A round is jointly led by Lingotto, the investment company owned by Exor, one of Europe's largest diversified holding companies, imec.xpand, an independently managed venture capital fund that focuses on hardware-based nanotechnology innovations, and Northern Gritstone, a fund formed by the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield to support academic spinouts in the north of England. The investment allows Optalysys to launch its technology on a cloud-based service model and to expand its team in England, Europe and the US.
The team was led by Partners Howard Palmer and Ross McNaughton and Associates Bella Thornton-Clark and Phoebe Sennett in the Corporate Technology team. Further support was provided by Partner Helen Farr and Associate Oscar Hodgson in the Employment, Mobility and Pensions team, and Partner Adrian Toutoungi and Associate Katie Atkinson in the Patents team.
