Lumai’s 2024 highlights: Industry summits, awards and new team members

From industry summits to welcoming new team members – and, of course, continuing our work in developing our 3D optical AI accelerator – it’s been another busy year for Lumai. 

For the industry, datacentres came to the fore in national news outlets in 2024, with their vast consumption of energy, water and other resources drawing particular attention. If anything, it strengthened the importance of our work in using 3D optical compute to deliver a breakthrough in AI performance and efficiency. 

As we continue  our work to transform the industry with the fastest, most energy-efficient AI datacentre processor, here we pick out some highlights from 2024. 

OCP membership and summit 

Lumai joined the Open Compute Project (OCP), an influential industry-led community focused on hardware technology to efficiently support the growing demands on compute infrastructure. We joined OCP as a member and also as part of the OCP Startup Program. 

As well as membership, we had the exciting opportunity to attend the 2024 OCP Regional Summit in Lisbon. The European Summit serves as a platform where the OCP community and leaders from EMEA come together to tackle issues related to datacenter sustainability.

Our team is growing quickly

The Lumai team is growing rapidly, and this year we were delighted to welcome Howard Winter as System Architect, Ivan Evans as Senior Optical Engineer, Huiying Lan as Senior Software Engineer, Priya Gupta as Senior IC Design Engineer, and Benjamin McCann as Electronic Design Engineer. We know that their expertise and experiences will be invaluable as we continue to develop our technology.

Quality recognition 

Not only is the team growing quickly, but it’s being recognised by the industry for its pioneering work. 

After being listed in the Photonics 100 last year, our co-founder and Head of Research Dr. Xianxin Guo was selected by The Royal Academy of Engineering to join its prestigious Shott Accelerator programme. Xianxin is currently following in the footsteps of over 150 other technology and engineering startup leaders, who have raised over £1 billion in investment, with a 12-month leadership programme designed to help entrepreneurs scale their businesses. 

But there was still to be a Lumai representative in the Photonics 100, as fellow co-founder James Spall was recognised in the list this year for 2025. Established by Electro Optics, the accolade is a testament to exceptional contributions and achievements in the field of optics.

The company also earned some notable achievements. The OCP crowned us the winner of the ‘Best Overall Technology’ award at the Future Technologies Symposium 2024. As part of this recognition, the team was awarded a $10,000 prize. The three core judging areas for the 2024 awards were innovation, the potential impact to the OCP community, and the realistic timeline to prevalence in the market. The OCP judges acknowledged that we offered “a very relevant gamechanger potential for future AI data centers with its 3D optical accelerator”.

Leading tech publication TechRound also declared Lumai one of the top 35 AI companies in its AITech35 list, celebrating the entrepreneurs and companies at the forefront of AI advancement.

Delivering a breakthrough

The AI Hardware and Edge AI Summit 2024 made its debut appearance in Europe this year. Our Head of Product, Phillip Burr, took part in a panel discussion which covered topics ranging from hardware challenges for AI in datacentres to the necessity for new, novel technologies. The summit was the perfect place to connect (and reconnect) with the AI hardware ecosystem.

Phil also attended the “super compute” conference this year (SC24), held in Atlanta, GA. AI was by far and away the most discussed topic across the keynotes, the technical tracks and on the exhibition floor. Efficiency, optimisation and sustainability were hot areas and clearly there is a lot of research underway in how best to use AI to tackle problems alongside HPC. 

As AI development continues to surge, finding ways to optimise AI hardware and infrastructure has never been more critical. If the event demonstrated anything, it’s that we need the whole AI hardware ecosystem to come together to deliver this breakthrough. 2025 should see the industry edge closer to this achievement.