Optalysys Ltd

Corporate information

Optalysys develops optical computing hardware that enables calculations on fully encrypted data. This innovation allows truly confidential computing at scale, with use cases ranging from financial services to healthcare research. As an enabling technology, it has the potential to unlock new markets centered around sharing and processing encrypted confidential data. At the heart of Optalysys technology is a cryptographic system that was first conceptualized in 1978 and only developed further after 2008. It is called Fully Homomorphic Encryption or FHE. FHE has the advantage that encrypted information can be added or multiplied, and even searched. The raw data is never decrypted in the process. Still, the result after decryption is the same as if the calculations were made on unencrypted data. The second big advantage of FHE is that it is future-proof and cannot even be hacked by yet-to-be-developed quantum computers. It has a big downside though, which prevented its application in practice so far: it is incredibly mathematically intensive and therefore about one million times slower than normal computing. Conventional computing hardware was simply never designed to work with encrypted data. Optalysys has developed a chiplet (a dedicated processing unit) that focuses on one thing and does it exceptionally well, namely performing the mathematical transformations that are at the core of FHE with an optical process, which means at the speed of light.