Overview
Hartley Ultrafast is a Bristol, UK deep-tech hardware company building the fastest AI decision-making silicon on Earth, using light.
Most AI inference hardware is built for scale and throughput. For a growing class of latency-critical applications, that isn't enough: a decision has to beat a competitor, or beat a physical process, to matter. Hartley's optoelectronic architecture computes small, dense neural networks directly in the analogue, photonic domain, delivering inference in nanoseconds rather than microseconds, while presenting a standard UCIe chiplet interface that integrates into existing CPU, FPGA, and SoC designs without redesigning the host system.
Our in-house proof-of-concept, Babbage, has demonstrated end-to-end inference in 176 nanoseconds. Clockwork, our first production timing chip, tapes out on an advanced RF process in Q2 2026. We hold four patents filed on the core architecture.
We are targeting the $162B market (2025, growing to $450B by 2030) for ultrafast decision-making across high-frequency trading, electronic warfare, communications and forward error correction, industrial process control, and AI acceleration: markets where every nanosecond of latency has measurable value.
Hartley was founded by Josh Silverstone, whose earlier work laid foundational IP for PsiQuantum and built one of the first photonic quantum computing labs. The founding team includes five PhDs in photonics, physics, and computer science, advised by semiconductor and computing veterans including Prof Bhavin Shastri and Prof David May FRS.
We are building the manufacturing, packaging, integration, and field-trial partnerships needed to bring nanosecond-class AI into production silicon.