After Intel’s $2.3B Bet on Classiq, Another Israeli Computing Company May Be Worth Watching (NASDAQ: CLGN)
Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) deal for Classiq is the loudest signal yet that the next computing platform is being fought over right now. The quieter signal is that the money is tilting toward photonic computing, where LightSolver already has real partners
Sponsored · Market Discovery ContentThe quantum computing industry got its biggest deal ever on October 26, 2026, when Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced a definitive agreement to acquire Classiq, an Israeli quantum-software company, for $2.3 billion in cash and stock. The deal pairs Classiq's software platform, which lets developers write quantum programs without hand-crafting circuits, with Intel's silicon spin-qubit manufacturing. It is a bet that quantum computing is finally maturing from research into a business.
But the same stretch of weeks carried a quieter signal. While quantum consolidates around a handful of giants, a different way of attacking the same problem, computing with photons, is pulling in money and customers faster than almost anywhere else in computing. And that is where LightSolver, a CollPlant company (NASDAQ: CLGN), sits.
Quantum Gets a Price Tag
Classiq's story shows how far quantum has come and how far it still has to go. Founded in 2020 by Nir Minerbi, Amir Naveh and Yehuda Naveh, the company set out to solve what Minerbi has called "an almost embarrassing problem: no one knew how to communicate with a quantum computer." Its synthesis platform abstracts away the underlying hardware, so a developer describes a problem and the software generates the circuit. Intel's interest is the proof that this software layer matters.
Yet even Minerbi is careful about the timeline. "A major commercial breakthrough has yet to materialize," he told Calcalist. Quantum machines still need near-absolute-zero temperatures, and the fault-tolerant hardware that would unlock their full promise remains years away. The $2.3 billion is a wager on the future, and it is also a consolidation signal: the quantum race is narrowing to a handful of deep-pocketed players who can afford to wait.
The Money Is Flowing Into Light
Photonic computing is moving on a different clock, and the funding tells the story. On October 1, Volantis, a startup founded by semiconductor and photonics veterans from NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom and Ayar Labs, raised an $88 million Series A to build a photonic AI inference system that runs models exceeding 20 trillion parameters at up to 10,000 tokens per second. Optalysys, a UK photonic-chip company, secured £23 million to commercialize chips that integrate data movement and processing on a single device. And in October, MIT's Julia Lab and Neurophos announced a collaboration to run advanced algorithms on Neurophos's Optical Processing Unit, a chip with millions of optical elements, aiming to cut the resources used in AI compute by roughly 50 times.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The same pressure that pushed Intel toward Classiq, the end of easy silicon scaling, is what makes photonics look like a practical answer rather than a research project. Electronic chips are hitting a wall of heat, power and memory bandwidth, and the models that run modern AI only make the problem worse with every release. Photonic hardware is being built specifically for that bottleneck, and it does not need the cryogenic cooling that quantum computers do, which is why its supporters argue it can reach the data center sooner.
The common thread is simple. Light is good at the matrix math that powers AI and simulation, and it does that math with a fraction of the energy of electronic chips. Matrix multiplication, the heartbeat of scientific computing and AI, turns out to be something light does naturally.
LightSolver Is the Pure Play
LightSolver is the purest expression of that idea in the public markets. Its Laser Processing Unit, or LPU, uses interacting lasers to compute, and the company describes it as delivering the equivalent of 1,000 TOPS with 200 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth at about 100 watts, in a rack-sized box at room temperature. The technology is already being tested by real partners: Boeing moved LightSolver to a strategic financial partnership in April 2026, and a joint project with HLRS, a European supercomputing center, produced peer-reviewed results projecting acceleration from roughly 40 times to more than 80,000 times on linear systems.
CollPlant completed its acquisition of LightSolver in September 2026, bringing the technology to the public markets and putting co-founder Dr. Ruti Ben-Shlomi on the CollPlant board. LightSolver targets commercial availability of the LPU in 2028, with a roadmap that scales from a 100,000-variable system in 2027 to a one-million-variable unit by 2029. The company's own framing is that it is not chasing general-purpose silicon, but offloading the specific, energy-hungry workloads, optimization and simulation chief among them, where light has a structural advantage.
The two stories of the month point the same direction. Quantum is consolidating into the hands of giants, and its commercial payoff still carries a date somewhere in the future. Photonic computing is being funded and tested today, and its roadmap is measured in quarters, not decades. For a reader watching the next computing platform take shape, LightSolver is the name to follow.
Recent News Highlights from LightSolver (NASDAQ: CLGN)
CollPlant Completes Acquisition of LightSolver, Entering the Photonic Computing Sector
CollPlant is Acquiring LightSolver, Enters Supercomputing and Photonic Computing Markets
LightSolver Selected as 2025 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum
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