Early Development (2016-2021)
LightOn was established in 2016 in Paris by French engineers and entrepreneurs Igor Carron, Laurent Daudet, Florent Krzakala and Sylvain Gigan. [3] 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), [4] was launched in 2018. [5] [6] The approach aims to increase the efficiency of massive parallel processing in tasks that involve large-scale data such has Large Language Model. [7] [8]
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. [9]
Parallel to this focus, starting in 2020, LightOn trained several LLMs and released a few as Open Source [10] [11] [12] on several supercomputers. LightOn's main product is now an on-prem, secure Enterprise generative AI platform.
In 2024, LightOn launched an IPO [13] [14] and became Europe's first listed GenAI startup. [15]
Between 2020 and 2024, LightOn has designed 12 Large Language Models.
Since the end of 2024, LightOn's solutions were implemented by various entities such as Ile-de-France region, Safran, Groupama, and the French Space Agency (CNES). The company also partnered with Orange Business and Hewlett Packard Enterprise to integrate its AI software with their cloud and hardware offerings. [1] LightOn, also released MonoQwen-Vision, the first visual document reranker [16] and in collaboration with AnswerAI, released ModernBERT, [17] a model that has been downloaded more than 20 million times. [18] [19]
In 2025, the LightOn Engineering team released several State of the Art models such as Reason-ModernColBERT, [20] GTE-ModernColBERT [21] and BioClinical ModernBERT. [22] The last model was the result of a collaboration in collaboration with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in collaboration with researchers at Harvard University, MIT, McGill University, Albany Medical College and Microsoft Research,
