Company: Optalysys
CEO, CTO: Nick New, Robert Todd
Website: https://optalysys.com/
About Optalysys
Founded in 2013, Optalysys is a Leeds-based company enabling the future of secure computing. It does this by using the power of advanced silicon photonics (light) to accelerate Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a cryptographic technique that allows data to be processed at scale without ever needing to be decrypted.
Data has become one of the worlds most valuable commodities, but due to technical, regulatory or commercial barriers, its often siloed within organisations, delivering a fraction of its potential value. FHE is a significant breakthrough in data security, allowing computations to be performed on encrypted data. However, current electronic computing methods are too slow to run FHE. Optalysys is developing technology that uses light to process data. Its proprietary photonic chips break through the speed and energy limits of traditional computing.
The technology has the potential to benefit multiple industries. Hospitals, for example, could securely send private data, such as MRI scans, to multiple sources for analysis while ensuring patient data remains secure and private. Financial services companies would be able to run fraud-detection models on encrypted transaction data so banks can identify suspicious activity while keeping customer details private, and defence companies could analyse encrypted satellite or sensor data on external systems, ensuring sensitive intelligence remains secure even during processing.
Optalysys FHE solution enables multiple parties to share and work on data without ever seeing or exposing it. This opens up new possibilities for using sensitive data, where legal, technical or commercial reasons have so far prevented data sharing.
Targeting blockchain as its first route to market, Optalysys is already seeing strong early traction for its technology. The company is leading the way in secure, confidential blockchain transactions, and earlier this year launched LightLocker Node, the worlds first dedicated hardware to ensure complete confidentiality for any transaction. It maintains blockchain decentralisation while adding the confidentiality, performance and scalability needed for enterprise adoption.
Optalysys is at the forefront of secure computing and privacy-enhancing technologies, already building partnerships with other innovative companies in the space, including Google HEIR and Duality Technologies. Optalysys has also raised over £30 million to date from investors including Northern Gritstone, Lingotto, Verve Ventures and imec.xpand.
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