NcodiN: EIC Accelerator Bet on Nanolaser Optical Interposers

The fastest AI processors are no longer single chips but packages of many chiplets, and the copper lines that connect them limit how far a signal can travel, how much data it can carry and how much energy each bit costs. NcodiN, a Palaiseau start-up incorporated in March 2023, proposes to replace those lines inside the package with light: an optical interposer, the layer the chiplets sit on, carrying thousands of nanolasers and nanodetectors joined by silicon waveguides. The company calls its laser the smallest integrated on silicon, about 500 times smaller than today's industry light sources, according to its CORDIS project summary and its March 2026 announcement with CEA-Leti.

The project, LUMIBRIDGE, appears in the EIC's list of companies selected from the 1 October 2025 cut-off, recommended for blended finance. CORDIS records a signed grant agreement (number 101297078, signed 10 June 2026) with an EU contribution of €2,499,656.25 from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2028. The equity half of the award is not in CORDIS, and no EIC Fund investment in NcodiN has been announced. Four months into the project, there is little to check against its plan, so this article reports what was promised and what the public record already shows.

Lasers on the interposer, not beside it

The science predates the company. In April 2017, C2N announced a paper in Nature Photonics, "Hybrid indium phosphide-on-silicon nanolaser diode", by a team including Raineri and working with STMicroelectronics, describing laser nanodiodes on silicon that carry information within a chip. The C2N group's page describes the design: an indium phosphide photonic crystal nanocavity placed on a silicon waveguide, which takes up its light through the evanescent field. The same page, written by the laboratory, lists continuous electrically driven lasing at room temperature with output above a few microwatts as a remaining challenge.

NcodiN's process, as Compound Semiconductor described it in January 2026, bonds indium phosphide epiwafers to silicon substrates and patterns lasers and photodetectors by photolithography. The company gives densities of more than 5,000 nanolasers per square millimetre in the CEA-Leti announcement and more than 10,000 per square millimetre in the Compound Semiconductor article, and an energy use of about 0.1 picojoules per bit. These are company figures; no independent measurement of them has been published.

The difference from the better-funded route is where the light is made. Co-packaged optics companies such as Ayar Labs, which closed a $500 million Series E in March 2026, place an optical input/output chiplet in the package and combine it with multi-wavelength light sources; Converge Digest put Ayar's valuation at $3.75 billion. NcodiN's pitch is to make the lasers small and cheap enough to scatter thousands of them across the interposer itself, next to every chiplet.

What LUMIBRIDGE promises

The CORDIS summary is written as a pitch. It says copper interconnects "have reached fundamental physical reach/bandwidth/efficiency barriers", that NcodiN's links deliver more than 30 times the bandwidth density, more than 25 times the reach and more than 100 times the energy efficiency, and that its nanolasers allow "unlimited scaling" towards wafer-scale networks-on-chip with hundreds of chiplets. It states that the company needs EIC support "to bridge the gap to industrialization". CORDIS lists no total project cost for it.

LUMIBRIDGE is the second EIC grant NcodiN holds. CORDIS also records LUMEN, an EIC Transition project (call HORIZON-EIC-2025-TRANSITIONOPEN) with €2,498,797.15 from 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2028, on photonic crystal nanolasers and nanodetectors for optical links between chiplets in one package. The two summaries overlap in subject; neither page explains how the work is divided between them. NcodiN is also a participant in STARLight, a Chips Joint Undertaking project on 300 mm silicon photonics coordinated by STMicroelectronics Crolles 2, where CORDIS records its share as €151,245 of €24.9 million in EU funding.

1. Move the nanolaser to industrial 300 mm wafersUnder wayA partnership with CEA-Leti to show 300 mm compatibility was announced in March 2026, per Compound Semiconductor and I-Connect007; no result or schedule is public.
2. Full optical links on siliconCompany claimThe company said in November 2025 it had shown nanolasers, nanodetectors and complete links on silicon; no paper or test data accompanies the claim.
3. 30x bandwidth density, 25x reach, 100x efficiency over copperNot measured in publicFigures from the CORDIS summary only.
4. A first customer or design partnerNot announcedNo customer is named in the company's news pages or in the funding coverage reviewed.

Two equity rounds, zero revenue

NcodiN's first round, €3.5 million from Elaia, Earlybird and OVNI Capital, was reported by Tech.eu on 28 May 2024. The company then had seven staff, its first paid employee having started the previous September, and it put its time to market at around five years. Tech.eu wrote that the technology "meets the evolving needs of scalers like Nvidia, Intel and Qualcomm"; none of the three is named anywhere as a customer.

On 20 November 2025, optics.org and Bits&Chips reported an oversubscribed €16 million seed round led by MIG Capital, with Maverick Silicon, PhotonVentures and Verve Ventures joining the earlier investors. The money was earmarked for product development, engineering hires, industrialisation on a 300 mm CMOS pilot line and a presence in Silicon Valley; no report found for this article says whether the US office has opened. The company also added advisers including Eli Yablonovitch of UC Berkeley.

The French company directory records revenue of €0 and a net loss of €2,903,536 for 2025, a head office in Palaiseau since 7 July 2025, and a 10 to 19 employee band for 2024. North Data shows the 2025 annual accounts published on 9 July 2026, an earlier address in Ivry-sur-Seine, and no insolvency proceedings among its listed events.

A company built from the lab outwards

The company's team page says Manegatti holds a PhD in optoelectronic nanodevices and worked at CNRS, IBM and C2N, and that Raineri spent 20 years at C2N after a PhD at Université Paris-Sud and a postdoctoral post at ICFO. The titles have moved since the seed round: the November 2025 coverage by optics.org named Raineri chief science officer and Bruno Garbin chief technology officer, while the company's website announces Raineri's appointment as chief technology officer on 26 May 2026. The same page lists appointments in September 2026 of a chief operations officer, a chief business officer, a chief product officer and a general manager for France; these appear only on the company's own site.

Where it fits in European chip policy

The European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to raise European semiconductor production by 2030 and funds pilot lines through the Chips Joint Undertaking, which also funds STARLight. LUMIBRIDGE's summary frames the project in those terms, as a matter of "Europe's digital sovereignty" in AI computing. Whether NcodiN can make its parts in volume on European lines is the question the CEA-Leti work exists to answer, and its answer is not yet public.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.