PicoJool, a Palo Alto optical connectivity startup, has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding to scale optical interconnect solutions for AI infrastructure.
PicoJool, a pioneer in optical connectivity for AI infrastructure, has raised $27.5 million in Series A funding led by Socratic Partners, with participation from Hudson River Trading. The round follows a $12 million seed round led by Playground Global, bringing total funding to $39.5 million.
The company will use the capital to expand teams and facilities in the United States and Taiwan while bringing its Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) and optical link products to market. PicoJool plans to grow its research and development, operations, sales and marketing organizations while building capacity to qualify, manufacture and support products for hyperscalers and data center operators.
"Reaching 200G per lane proved that the performance is there. Our focus now is execution," said Al Yuen, founder and CEO of PicoJool. "This funding allows us to expand our teams in the U.S. and Taiwan, qualify products with customers and move a complete portfolio from chip-level VCSELs and microVCSELs into AOC and NPO modules. We are building the connectivity platform customers will need for the next decade of AI infrastructure."
AI clusters are growing in both processor count and data volume between nodes, placing pressure on interconnect performance and data center power budgets. PicoJool applies VCSEL technology's cost and manufacturing advantages to a portfolio of optical connectivity products designed to scale from 800G to 1.6T, 3.2T and beyond. The company is seeing growing customer interest in microVCSEL products, including 50G NRZ configurations for optical compute interconnects and 64G NRZ/PAM4 configurations for PCIe 6.0-based NPO applications. PicoJool has started early sampling of its chip-level VCSEL products ahead of broader availability.
The portfolio includes high-speed VCSEL products (100G, 200G) and lower-power microVCSEL configurations (50G NRZ, 64G NRZ/PAM4). The microVCSEL platform uses a massively parallel architecture to increase aggregate bandwidth while reducing the energy required to move each bit of data—addressing a critical constraint for hyperscale AI systems.
"Moving data efficiently dictates how quickly and economically AI scales," said Greg Waters, General Partner at Socratic Partners. "PicoJool combines a proven team with a unique approach that brings VCSEL technology's cost and manufacturing advantages to AI-scale bandwidth and power needs. They are poised to become a vital connectivity platform for next-generation data centers."
The Series A follows June's unveiling of PicoJool's 200G VCSEL and microVCSEL product family for scale-up AI data centers. The 200G products exceed 37GHz of bandwidth, with the portfolio including quad 100G, quad 200G and 32x50G NRZ microVCSEL configurations that give customers multiple paths to 1.6T connectivity based on bandwidth, power and system requirements.
"The network is the AI, and connectivity is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance. The industry needs a solution that can increase bandwidth while sharply improving power and cost," said Pat Gelsinger, General Partner at Playground Global. "PicoJool brings together breakthrough VCSEL performance, deep systems expertise and a manufacturing base capable of supporting tremendous scale. The team is well positioned to move quickly from an important technical milestone to products that can reshape how AI infrastructure moves data."
PicoJool is working with WIN Semiconductor and other gallium arsenide (GaAs) foundries to prepare its 200G VCSELs for production. WIN has shipped more than one billion chips over the past decade, bringing significant high-volume manufacturing experience as PicoJool prepares products for qualification and production. The company is also working with system companies and hyperscalers to define next-generation pluggable, NPO and co-packaged optics solutions.