Ayar Labs Raises $155M in Series D Funding Round

Ayar Labs has raised $155 million in a round of Series D financing led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital.

The San Jose, California-based company said Wednesday it will use the capital to support high-volume production of its in-package optical interconnects to help address the need for scalable artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The latest funding round brings Ayar Labs’ valuation to above $1 billion and includes new and existing investors, such as AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, NVIDIA, 3M Ventures and Autopilot.

Applied Ventures, Axial Partners, Boardman Bay Capital Management, GlobalFoundries, IAG Capital Partners, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Playground Global and VentureTech Alliance also participated in the round, which brings Ayar Labs’ total funding to $370 million.

“The leading GPU providers – AMD and NVIDIA – and semiconductor foundries – GlobalFoundries, Intel Foundry, and TSMC – combined with the backing of Advent, Light Street, and our other investors underscores the potential of our optical I/O technology to redefine the future of AI infrastructure,” said Mark Wade, CEO and co-founder of Ayar Labs.

Optical I/O Technology

Founded in 2015, Ayar Labs has developed optical I/O technology that is optimized for AI training and inference and is based on open standards.

The technology can integrate into AI systems at scale and is designed to enable customers to maximize the performance and compute efficiency of AI infrastructure while reducing power consumption, costs and latency.

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