Ayar Labs raises $130M in Series C funding

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Ayar Labs, the leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, today announced that the company has secured $130 million in additional financing led by Boardman Bay Capital Management to drive the commercialization of its breakthrough optical I/O solution.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA entered this investment round, joining existing strategic investors Applied Ventures LLC, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital and Lockheed Martin Ventures. Other new strategic and financial investors participating in the round include Agave SPV, Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners and Tyche Partners. They join existing investors such as BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, Playground Global and TechU Venture Partners.

Ayar Labs’ optical I/O solution eliminates the bottlenecks associated with system bandwidth, power consumption, latency, and reach, dramatically improving existing system architectures and enabling new, previously unrealizable solutions for artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC), cloud, telecommunications, aerospace and remote sensing applications. With the new investment, Ayar Labs is ramping production and securing supply chain partners, as signaled by previously announced multi-year strategic collaborations with Lumentum and Macom, both leaders in optical and photonic products, as well as GlobalFoundries on its new GF Fotonix platform.

Ayar Labs also announced that it made its first volume commercial shipments under contract and expects to ship thousands of units of its in-package optical interconnect by end of year.

The full text of the press release is here.

Ayar Labs