PicoJool has raised $27.5M in a Series A led by Socratic Partners, with Hudson River Trading participating, bringing total funding to $39.5M. An earlier $12M seed was led by Pat Gelsinger’s Playground Global, and the former Intel chief executive has stayed close to the company.
The startup builds vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, or VCSELs, the semiconductor diodes that push data through optical cable instead of wire. Its 100G and 200G parts, plus lower-power MicroVCSEL configurations, target the copper interconnects linking accelerators inside AI data centers.
The pressure is real. Operators now run clusters of hundreds or thousands of processors that constantly exchange packets, and copper links struggle with the bandwidth while burning power that shows up in the cost of running models.
“Reaching 200G per lane proved that the performance is there,” founder and chief executive Al Yuen said. The money goes to teams in the US and Taiwan, customer qualification, and moving the portfolio from chip-level parts into modules.
PicoJool is working with WIN Semiconductors and other foundries on volume production. Gelsinger’s framing is blunt: “The network is the AI, and connectivity is becoming one of the defining constraints on performance.”
