Ayar Labs expands Series C funding with another $25 million
Co-packaged optics technology developer Ayar Labs says it has added another $25 million in Series C1 funding, led by new investor Capital TEN. Other sources of the new funding include VentureTech Alliance as well as previous investors Boardman Bay Capital Management, IAG Capital Partners, NVIDIA, and Tyche Partners.
The new capital raised Ayar Labs’ total Series C funding to $155 million. Past strategic and financial investors in the company include Applied Ventures, GlobalFoundries, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, Intel Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures.
The money will go towards acceleration of the implementation and commercialization of Ayar Labs’ optical I/O technology (see “Ayar Labs: 2022 is the year of scale”) as well as increase hiring plans by up to 50% this year. The company has announced several commercialization partners (see, for example, “HPE, Ayar Labs pair to bring optical I/O to HPE Slingshot Ethernet fabric,” “Ayar Labs partners with GLOBALFOUNDRIES for optical I/O demo, expanded sampling for co-packaged optics,” and “Ayar Labs, NVIDIA team to apply optical I/O to artificial intelligence/HPC architectures”). It has seen most of its initial success in support of artificial intelligence/machine learning and high-performance computing (HFC) applications. However, Ayar Labs believes its technology also could benefit such markets as cloud and data center, telecommunications, and aerospace and defense.
“We’re extremely pleased with the ongoing interest and financing we’ve received from leaders in the semiconductor industry,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “This C1 adds sophisticated investor partners that will allow us to accelerate our strategic roadmap and is further validation of our technology and plan to bring silicon photonics-based interconnect solutions to market at scale.”
“We believe that future computing solutions will include large-scale use of silicon photonics for data communications, and have been following Ayar Labs for some time now,” commented Pin-Nan Tseng, general partner at Capital TEN. “Given our deep expertise in the semiconductor industry and the Taiwan semiconductor ecosystem, we believe Ayar Labs has the technology solution, people, capital, and broad support to lead in the transition from copper to optical interconnects for scale-out computing and memory applications.”
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Stephen Hardy | Editorial Director and Associate Publisher, Lightwave
Stephen Hardy is editorial director and associate publisher of Lightwave and Broadband Technology Report, part of the Lighting & Technology Group at Endeavor Business Media. Stephen is responsible for establishing and executing editorial strategy across the both brands’ websites, email newsletters, events, and other information products. He has covered the fiber-optics space for more than 20 years, and communications and technology for more than 35 years. During his tenure, Lightwave has received awards from Folio: and the American Society of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) for editorial excellence. Prior to joining Lightwave in 1997, Stephen worked for Telecommunications magazine and the Journal of Electronic Defense.
Stephen has moderated panels at numerous events, including the Optica Executive Forum, ECOC, and SCTE Cable-Tec Expo. He also is program director for the Lightwave Innovation Reviews and the Diamond Technology Reviews.
He has written numerous articles in all aspects of optical communications and fiber-optic networks, including fiber to the home (FTTH), PON, optical components, DWDM, fiber cables, packet optical transport, optical transceivers, lasers, fiber optic testing, and more.
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