Ayar Labs, the silicon photonics interconnect specialist, has raised an additional $25 million in Series C1 funding, bringing its total Series C raise to $155 million.
The oversubscribed up round was led by new investor Capital TEN. Other investors are VentureTech Alliance, Boardman Bay Capital Management, IAG Capital Partners, NVIDIA, and Tyche Partners, Applied Ventures, GlobalFoundries, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, Intel Capital and Lockheed Martin Ventures.
Ayar Labs’ optical I/O approach uses industry-standard, cost-effective silicon processing techniques to replace traditional electrical I/O with fast, high-density, low power optical I/O chiplets and multi-wavelength light sources.
Moving data between chips using light instead of electricity breaks the performance, power, and distance limitations of copper interconnect, critical for latency-sensitive applications such as high performance computing, AI and machine learning.
Optical I/O will also impact other areas that require rapid transfer of data, such as cloud and data center, telecommunications, and aerospace and defense.
“This C1 adds sophisticated investor partners that will allow us to accelerate our strategic roadmap,” says CEO Charles Wuischpard.
Ayar Labs will use the funds to accelerate product implementation and commercialisation and increase hiring plans by up to 50% this year
