By Ofer Shapiro, CEO and Co-Founder, Quantum Pulse Ventures
June 16, 2026
A colleague of mine, who happens to be a professor of quantum physics, recently read the Quantum Pulse 2.0 announcement and challenged me without missing a beat:
“Ofer, what are you talking about? The idea of using light to perform mathematical operations, computation, and quantum operations has been known for decades. What is new here?”
He had a point. It’s not news that light has the ability to do more than just carry information. Physicists and engineers have long understood that light can interfere, split, combine, encode phase, carry polarization, and perform operations that are deeply mathematical in nature. In quantum systems, light is not just a carrier of information. It can be the information itself.
So the question is not whether light can compute but rather why does it matter now?
For most of the modern technology era, light was used overwhelmingly for moving information from one point to another. Once it arrived from point A to point B, the processing and computation were then performed electronically. That worked for a long time, electronics were programmable and scalable. Even when light had an elegant theoretical advantage, the honest commercial question was always the same: is the juice worth the squeeze?
Overwhelmingly, it was not. You could build a beautiful optical system, but if an electronic solution was good enough, easier to engineer and package, the market chose electronics.
The need for more ‘juice’:
We are beginning to reach the limits of what electronics can practically deliver in several important fields. Advanced computing, AI infrastructure, quantum computing, quantum communication, and in-network processing are all pushing systems into domains where simply moving bits electronically, processing them digitally, and scaling through more conventional hardware becomes too expensive, power-hungry, complex, or simply not physically appropriate.
Quantum computing is the clearest example. A useful quantum computer depends on physical phenomena that cannot be reproduced by conventional electronics at any reasonable complexity. When we think about connecting quantum computers or routing entanglement, the role of light becomes even more fundamental.
Another example is optical AI and photonic computing. Matrix operations, interference, analog computation, and in-network photonic processing are being explored because the electronic path is becoming increasingly difficult to scale. The world is asking for more computation but demanding lower latency, lower energy, and new architectures.
Why we can ‘squeeze’ more from light:
For decades, integrated photonics was promising but difficult to scale into complex, reliable, packaged systems. Today, the photonics ecosystem is advancing rapidly. Manufacturing processes, packaging, and core optical components are maturing, enabling larger and more sophisticated photonic circuits.
We are entering a period where light is no longer a communication medium, but rather part of the computational fabric.
That transition creates a new challenge.
When light only carries information from one point to another, the system can tolerate a certain amount of imperfection. Once light becomes part of the computation or processing, every small physical error matters. Every polarization element, loss mechanism, fabrication variation, and directional coupler directly affects the accuracy of the result.
This is especially true in quantum systems, where the cost of small errors can be enormous. A modest improvement at the component level translates into a very large improvement at the system level. In quantum computing, lower physical error rates can reduce the overhead required for error correction. In quantum routing, better optical fidelity and polarization control can increase the rate and quality of distributed entanglement. In optical AI and matrix multiplication, more accurate and stable photonic operations can support larger systems with less drift and less recalibration.
That is why Quantum Pulse 2.0 is exciting.
QP2.0 is about making photonic computation practical at the moment the market finally needs it.
Our platform is designed to improve the fidelity, robustness, and fabrication tolerance of critical photonic building blocks regardless of fabrication technology. The goal is not to replace existing fabrication platforms, but to extend what they can achieve through improving operation fidelity by an order of magnitude.
This is why we describe QP2.0 as a platform. The same underlying approach improves multiple photonic functions across next-generation photonics.
This decade will be remembered as the period when computation began a major architectural shift from electronics alone toward systems where photonics plays an active computational role.
The industry needs a new level of accuracy, precision, stability, and fabrication tolerance in photonic integrated circuits. Quantum Pulse 2.0 was built for this moment.
Exponential demand is finally meeting exponential capability. Quantum Pulse is excited to be part of this transition.
To learn more about the Quantum Pulse 2.0 platform, read the press release.