Celero Communications has closed a $275M Series C led by Alphabet’s CapitalG fund, Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners, valuing the Irvine, California startup at $3B. Returning backers Sutter Hill Ventures and Maverick Silicon also joined.
Celero designs coherent digital signal processors, the specialized chips that manage the fiber-optic transceivers linking data centers over spans that can exceed 100 miles. Its chip targets AI workloads with lower latency and power draw, and it extends data streams with error-correction bits so the light that dims inside long fibers does not corrupt traffic. The company says the same silicon serves both long-haul links between facilities and internal scale-up and scale-out networks.
Before announcing the round, Celero validated a version of its chip built on TSMC’s two-nanometer node, the most advanced production process on the market. The design supports 1.6T and 3.2T interconnects, transmitting up to 3.2 terabits per second per port, well beyond what today’s AI networks move.
AI infrastructure is rapidly outgrowing traditional optical interconnect architectures, co-founder and CEO Nariman Yousefi said. The raise is another bet that the networking layer, not just GPUs, becomes the next constraint in AI buildouts, and that young chip companies can win sockets in data centers still being wired with older optics.
