Exor
Consultancy : Company : Private Equity
We are a holding company with a culture that combines entrepreneurial spirit and financial discipline. Our purpose is to build great companies, while providing opportunities for our people to grow, make a positive contribution to society and deliver superior returns to our investors. Great companies perform to the highest standards, seek renewal and change, are distinctive in what they do and act in a responsible way.
Assembly Line
Leeds-based photonic chip company Optalysys raises £21 million to unlock its Fully Homomorphic Encryption process
Photonic chip maker Optalysys has raised a £21 million Series A funding which will see it ‘advance its Enable photonic computing technology to unlock a new form of secure processing known as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)’.
Backing the company is the Agnelli family through Lingotto which is owned by Exor – the Agnelli family holding company. The round was led by Lingotto, imec.xpand, and Northern Gritstone.
FHE, a form of quantum-secure cryptography, doesn’t require the data to be decrypted before it can be processed, allowing confidential or sensitive data to be sent along untrusted networks, or to be worked on by multiple parties without ever exposing the data itself.
🫧 Accelerating Carbon Removal with our $100m Series B
Our new funding was led by General Catalyst. The firm is deeply committed to investing in ‘responsible innovation’ companies that can deliver outsized financial and societal returns. General Catalyst’s CEO and Managing Director Hemant Taneja will join our board alongside Ryan Panchadsaram from John Doerr’s office (also, authors of Speed and Scale). We’re proud that Lowercarbon, Exor Ventures, Kinnevik, Thrive Capital and Elad Gil also invested as part of the round.
We’ll be using the new funding to accelerate our carbon removal deliveries. After deploying increasingly advanced pilot processes in 2021 and 2022, we began ramping up in 2023. Our primary focus is expanding bio-oil production and transport capacity, and since the beginning of the year we’ve increased tons of carbon removal delivered per week 5x.