36Kr Exclusive | Shanghai Jiao Tong University Associate Professor Builds Optical Computing Chip Startup; Raises Five Rounds of Seed Funding from Investors Including Yunqi and Atom Capital Within Six Months, Sends Chips for Tape-Out

Image source: company This article is about 3,300 characters; estimated reading time is 8 minutes. Author: Ouxue Editor: Yuan Silai Hard Kr learned that Zhizi Guangyuan, an optical computing chip company, has completed a seed round of financing worth several hundred million yuan. Since its founding, the company has completed five consecutive seed rounds of financing. Investors include Haitong International Innovation Center, Yunqi Capital, Guotai Haitong, Xianfeng Changqing, Atom Venture, Tongxin Capital, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University AI Future Fund. The funds will be mainly used for core chip research and development and tape-out iterations, recruitment of high-end talent and team building, and expansion of application scenarios and ecosystem cooperation. Zhizi Guangyuan was founded in May 2026, focusing on the research and development of reconfigurable all-optical computing architectures and photonic processors. It uses the parallel computing characteristics of light to directly participate in AI computation, bypassing the bottlenecks that traditional electronic chips face in process scaling, power consumption, and heat dissipation, and advancing optical computing from specialized acceleration toward a more general-purpose computing platform. Zhizi Guangyuan has so far assembled an R&D team of nearly 50 people. Its core members have long worked in optical computing and chip design, have completed the design, tape-out, and verification of dozens of optical chips, and have published nearly 20 papers in the Nature and Science series. Founder Cheng Yuan is an associate professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Artificial Intelligence, has long engaged in photonic chip and edge intelligence research, and formerly served as co-founder and CTO of Xinminer Technology, where he led the building of a full-stack product system. In terms of product planning, Zhizi Guangyuan has mapped out two product lines: server-side optoelectronic acceleration boards and edge-side optical computing chips. The first-version chips for both products have been sent for tape-out, and the company plans to roll out deployable products within the next six months. Currently, competition in AI computing power is shifting from simply pursuing peak computing power to how much effective intelligent output can be supported per unit of electricity. As AI evolves from single-turn Q&A to agents that think continuously, call tools, and execute tasks, token consumption is growing rapidly, and cost, power supply, and heat dissipation are becoming real constraints on computing expansion. Traditional electronic chips are approaching the upper limit of Moore's Law, and relying solely on process scaling will hardly keep up with growing demand. The idea behind optical computing is to map matrix operations onto the interference and diffraction processes of light, using light propagation itself to complete large numbers of parallel multiply-accumulate operations. Cheng Yuan said that AI needs computing carriers that are truly low-power, do not depend on advanced process nodes, and can be engineered for real-world deployment, and that optical computing has natural advantages in parallelism, latency, and energy efficiency. The optical computing industry is currently in the early stage of engineering deployment, with multiple technical routes being pursued in parallel in China, few usable products on the market, and most being small-scale, specialized computing, making it difficult to