Ayar Labs Adds $25M To Series C1 Round

Ayar Labs, a Santa Clara, CA-based company which specializes in silicon photonics for chip-to-chip connectivity, raised an additional $25 million in Series C1 funding.

The round, which brought the total amount raised in Series C to date to $155M, was led by new investor Capital TEN. VentureTech Alliance also entered the Series C expansion that included participation by previous investors Boardman Bay Capital Management, IAG Capital Partners, NVIDIA, and Tyche Partners. Existing strategic and financial investors include Applied Ventures, GlobalFoundries, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, Intel Capital and Lockheed Martin Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate the implementation and commercialization of its optical I/O solutions to address the power consumption, latency, reach and system bandwidth bottlenecks that threaten future advances in generative AI, while also expanding product offerings and development efforts.

Led by CEO Charles Wuischpard, Ayar Labs leverages patented optical I/O approach that uses silicon processing techniques to replace traditional electrical I/O with high-density, low power optical I/O chiplets and multi-wavelength light sources. Moving data between chips using light instead of electricity breaks the performance, power, and distance limitations of copper interconnect, critical for latency-sensitive applications such as high performance computing, AI and machine learning. Optical I/O will also impact other areas that require rapid transfer of data, such as cloud and data center, telecommunications, and aerospace and defense.