US-headquartered optical connectivity technology provider Ayar Labs received $130m in financing on Tuesday from investors including corporates Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Nvidia, Applied Materials, GlobalFoundries, Intel and Lockheed Martin.
Boardman Bay Capital Management led the round, which also featured Agave SPV, Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, Tyche Partners, BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, Playground Global and TechU Venture Partners.
Enterprise technology provider HPE, graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia and GlobalFoundries invested directly while fellow chipmaker Intel, semiconductor production technology provider Applied and aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin did so through Intel Capital, Applied Ventures and Lockheed Martin Ventures respectively.
Aya’s in-package optical input/output chiplets are designed to replace copper backplane and pluggable optics communications in order to improve the bandwidth density of chip interconnects in semiconductors.
The company said this week it has produced its first commercial-level shipments, and the funding will support an increase in manufacturing capacity slated to take place later this year.
Nvidia’s senior vice-president of research, Bill Dally, said: “Optical connectivity will be important to scale accelerated computing clusters to meet the fast-growing demands of [artificial intelligence] and [high-performance compute] workloads.
“Ayar Labs has unique optical I/O technology that meets the needs of scaling next-generation silicon photonics-based architectures for AI.”
The round boosted Ayar’s overall funding to over $191m, $24m of which came through a $24m series A round in 2018 led by Playground Global and backed by GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital and Founders Fund, before Lockheed Martin Ventures added an undisclosed sum in March 2020.
Downing Ventures and BlueSky Capital led the company’s $35m series B round eight months later, investing with GlobalFoundries, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Intel Capital, Applied Ventures, Castor Ventures Fund, Founders Fund, Playground Global and SGInnovate.
Photo courtesy of Ayar Labs, Inc.
