We are LightOn

LightOn is an international team (10+ nationalities) with headquarters in downtown Paris.
The company was founded in 2016 by Igor Carron, Laurent Daudet, Sylvain Gigan, and Florent Krzakala as a spinoff from university.

The history of LightOn

Founded in 2016 with the ambition to push the boundaries of extreme-scale AI, both in software and hardware, LightOn’s early significant contributions include the design of the Optical Processing Unit (OPU), the world’s first photonic AI co-processor. The OPU has been used by researchers worldwide on a dedicated cloud platform, and integrated onto one of the world’s largest supercomputer - another world premiere. Since 2020, LightOn’s team has been focusing on building and commercializing state-of-the-art Foundation Models for Generative AI, including Large Language Models that are capable of understanding, analyzing, writing, reasoning, and planning

Co-founders

Igor Carron, Co-CEO

Co-founder

Igor has held several positions in the business development and the management of technical teams in space and nuclear engineering projects. He is also the co-organizer of the Paris Machine Learning meetup, one of the largest Data Science meetup in the world with more than 7,000 members. Igor also writes a technical blog with a focus on algorithms, data and sensors that has been viewed more than 7 million times since its inception. Igor holds a Ph.D from Texas A&M University and an Engineering degree from INPG.

Laurent Daudet Co-CEO
Co-founder

Laurent is a graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Marseille University. He is a former fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France, which recognizes the top 2% of French university professors for their research excellence. Laurent has been a consultant to various small and large companies, and is a co-inventor in several patents. He has co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, and over 120 conference proceedings.