We've led EMode Photonix's $1 million pre-seed round

Today we’re proud to announce we have led a $1 million pre-seed round in EMode Photonix.

The Boulder, Colorado-based company delivers powerful simulation tools to allow novel photonics technologies for quantum computers to be developed faster.

Integrated photonics is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting areas of technology currently. Traditionally developed for telecommunications, it is finding increasing use in sensing, computing (see Nvidia investing billions in partnerships with photonics companies to replace copper wire), and especially quantum technologies.

Traditionally, photonics engineers could rely on existing simulations of linear photonics, which is sufficient for simple light routing circuits. However, the next generation of photonic devices exploit non-linear photonics, which not only allows one to bridge and generate different frequencies of light, but even enables the conversion of classical to quantum light.

Up until now, there haven’t been any efficient tools for simulating non-linear photonics. EMode Photonix has developed a unique simulation stack, based on proprietary computational techniques, that speeds up the simulation of non-linear photonic circuits by 1,000x.

EMode was co-founded by Eric Stanton and ​​Maiya Stanton. Eric previously researched photonics at UC Santa Barbara, NIST, and University of Colorado Boulder. Based in Boulder, within a stone’s throw of the R&D facilities of several major quantum computing companies, they are in prime position to fuel the development of new quantum infrastructure.

Having successfully commercialized its software for use in research labs, the company is now preparing an enterprise offering that will allow complete photonic integrated circuit design in a single day, to support the burgeoning market for quantum computer development.

The new funds will be used to scale product development and sales.

As our partner Kris Kaczmarek says:

“EMode Photonix is well positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for photonics tooling required by quantum computing companies, regardless of the modality they use. With a truly unique approach to their product that supports a much larger variety of devices and materials than existing alternatives, we’re proud to back Eric, Maiya, and their team as they bring their software to the enterprise market.”