LightOn

LightOn SA is a French company focused on artificial intelligence (AI), that develops generative AI solutions for enterprises. Its current product is the Paradigm platform, an on-prem/secure Enterprise generative AI platform. In November 2024, it became Europe's first listed GenAI startup to launched an IPO on Euronext Growth Paris. LightOn was established in 2016 in Paris by French engineers and entrepreneurs Igor Carron, Laurent Daudet, Florent Krzakala and Sylvain Gigan. The founders, with backgrounds in optics and AI, aimed to develop hardware solutions that could accelerate AI computations using optical processing. The company's first product, the Optical Processing Unit (OPU), was launched in 2018. The approach aims to increase the efficiency of massive parallel processing in tasks that involve large-scale data such has Large Language Model. In 2021, One of LightOn OPU was integrated in Jean Zay, one of the French National Centre for Scientific Research supercomputer, making it the first of the TOP500 world's most powerful computer using such hardware. Parallel to this focus, starting in 2020, LightOn trained several LLMs and released a few as Open Source on several supercomputers. LightOn's main product is now an on-prem, secure Enterprise generative AI platform called Paradigm.