Ayar Labs, a photonics-based chip interconnect startup, raises $130M in Series C funding.

Ayar Labs of Santa Clara, CA, USA has secured $130 million in additional financing led by Boardman Bay Capital Management to drive the commercialization of its integrated optical I/O solution, targeted at artificial intelligence, cloud, high-performance computing, 5G, and light detection and ranging applications. The investment round included participation from both new strategic investors and financial partners, alongside existing backers. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA entered the round as new strategic investors, joining existing strategic investors Applied Ventures LLC, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures. Additional new investors include Agave SPV, Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Tyche Partners, alongside existing investors BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, Playground Global, and TechU Venture Partners.

Will Graves, chief investment officer at Boardman Bay Capital Management, stated: "As a successful technology-focused crossover fund operating for over a decade, Ayar Labs represents our largest private investment to date. We believe that silicon photonics-based optical interconnects in the data-center and telecommunications markets represent a massive new opportunity and that Ayar Labs is the leader in this emerging space with proven technology, a fantastic team, and the right ecosystem partners and strategy."

Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior VP of research at NVIDIA, noted that "Optical connectivity will be important to scale accelerated computing clusters to meet the fast-growing demands of AI and HPC workloads. Ayar Labs has unique optical I/O technology that meets the needs of scaling next-generation silicon photonics-based architectures for AI." Paul Glaser, VP and head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder at HPE's venture arm, added: "Ayar Labs' highly differentiated technology is crucial to supporting the high-performance computing architectures of the future. Ayar Labs represents a strategic investment opportunity for HPE to help our customers more efficiently derive greater insights and value from their data."

Ayar Labs' optical I/O solution eliminates bottlenecks associated with system bandwidth, power consumption, latency and reach, dramatically improving existing system architectures and enabling new solutions for AI, HPC, cloud, telecommunications, aerospace and remote sensing applications. The company is ramping production and securing supply chain partners through previously announced multi-year strategic collaborations with optical and photonic product makers Lumentum and MACOM, as well as GlobalFoundries on its new GF Fotonix platform.

Ayar Labs CEO Charles Wuischpard stated: "The overall financing is much larger than we originally targeted, underscoring the market opportunity for optical I/O and Ayar Labs' leadership position in silicon photonics-based interconnect solutions. This financing allows us to fully qualify our solution against industry standards for quality and reliability and scale production starting this year." The company has already made its first volume commercial shipments under contract and expects to ship thousands of units of its in-package optical interconnect by the end of the year.