Wakefield supercomputer startup raises £3 million funding

Technology start-up Optalysys Ltd based in Wakefield and Nevada, US, has raised more than £3 million from angel investors in order to manufacture its first commercially available product.

The company has raised £3.05m ($3.95m) from undisclosed angel investors to manufacture the first commercially available high-performance computing (HPC) processor based on its patented optical processing technology.

Optalysis’ coprocessor excels at rapid and accurate pattern recognition (required for Big Data processing) and mathematical model generation applications.

The company is targeting genomic sequence alignment as the first of many application areas for its processor.

Optalysys says its HPC systems have the potential to exceed what can be achieved with electronics at a fraction of the cost and energy consumption.

Emma Blaylock, director and chief commercial officer at Optalysys, said: “Our prototype is on track to achieve game-changing improvements to process times over current methods whilst providing high levels of accuracy that are associated with the best software processes.

Dr Nick New, chief executive of Optalysys, said: “In many industries today, the demand for faster processing far exceeds the capabilities of conventional computing technology.

“Until now, only large universities and organizations have had the means to use this kind of computing muscle.

“Our aim is to make supercomputing levels of processing power accessible to a much wider audience of scientists and researchers – which will promote more rapid advancement in such fields as precision medicine and machine learning, whilst addressing some of the fundamental limitations of conventional computing.”