Ayar Labs raises $130m for optical chiplets
Optical chiplet developer Ayar Labs has raised $130m from a consortium including Nvidia and Hewlett Packard Enterprises.
The Series C round brings the total investment to $195m and was led by Boardman Bay Capital Management to drive the commercialization of its optical I/O technology. Existing strategic investors include Applied Ventures, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital and Lockheed Martin Ventures.
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The company has made its first volume commercial shipments under contract and expects to ship thousands of units of its in-package optical interconnect by end of year.
Ayar Labs’ optical I/O solution eliminates the bottlenecks associated with system bandwidth, power consumption, latency, and reach for artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC), cloud, telecommunications, aerospace, and remote sensing applications. The investment will ramp production and secure supply chain partners, following multi-year strategic collaborations with Lumentum and Macom, both leaders in optical and photonic products, as well as GlobalFoundries on its GF Fotonix platform.
New investors in the round include Agave SPV, Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Tyche Partners.
“As a successful technology-focused crossover fund operating for over a decade, Ayar Labs represents our largest private investment to date,” said Will Graves, Chief Investment Officer at Boardman Bay Capital Management. “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.”
“Optical connectivity will be important to scale accelerated computing clusters to meet the fast-growing demands of AI and HPC workloads,” said Bill Dally, Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at NVIDIA. “Ayar Labs has unique optical I/O technology that meets the needs of scaling next-generation silicon photonics-based architectures for AI.”
“Ayar Labs’ highly differentiated technology is crucial to supporting the high-performance computing architectures of the future,” said Paul Glaser, Vice President and Head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, HPE’s venture arm. “Ayar Labs represents a strategic investment opportunity for HPE to help our customers more efficiently derive greater insights and value from their data.”
“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,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “This financing allows us to fully qualify our solution against industry standards for quality and reliability and scale production starting this year.”
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