Lumilens has come out of stealth with $900M in funding for optical chips that link processors inside AI data centers.
A $700M Series C, which valued the company at $5.51B, accounts for most of the haul. Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital co-led the round, with more than a dozen additional backers including Qualcomm.
Ankur Singla, a repeat founder whose earlier networking companies Contrail Systems and Volterra were acquired for $676M combined, serves as CEO. The two-year-old firm says it has taken billions in chip orders already.
The startup’s pitch: replace the copper wires that traditionally move data between processors with faster fiber-optic links. Its product lineup spans two networking categories, scale-up, which connects chips within a single server rack, and scale-out, which ties racks together.
On the scale-up side, Lumilens makes co-packaged optics that mount directly on GPUs and can link thousands of them, as well as near-packaged optics that live on the motherboard rather than the processor package.
With AI clusters growing rapidly, optical interconnects have become a prized segment of the chip market, and investors are writing nine-figure checks before startups even reach volume production.
