Ayar Labs, a startup founded in 2015 and focused on optical interconnect, says it has landed $35 million in Series B funding. Downing Ventures (U.K.) and BlueSky Capital co-led the round, with with the former a new investor and the latter an existing one. Other new investors include Applied Ventures, LLC, Castor Ventures, and SGInnovate (Singapore). They join previous investors Founders Fund, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Intel Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures, and Playground Global as well as BlueSky Capital.
The company says it plans to use the cash infusion to speed up product development and commercialization of its in-package optical interconnect (OIO) technology and expand its footprint internationally. Ayar Labs is developing “chiplets” and lasers to provide OIO for co-packaged optics and related applications wherein OIO would replace standard electrical interconnect. The company asserts its technology can lead to a 1000X improvement in interconnect bandwidth density at 10X lower power than conventional electronic interconnect. Ayar Labs has worked with Intel on co-packaged optics via the DARPA PIPES initiative.
“Over the last year, we have continued to invest and grow our organization, and have demonstrated a number of technology firsts while securing additional customer and ecosystem relationships,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “The investment interest from new and existing strategic and financial investors despite these difficult global times allows us to continue executing our long-range plan for making Ayar Labs Optical I/O a ubiquitous computing solution.”
“Ayar Labs represents the future of interconnects which have eventual applicability to every electronic device on earth,” commented Warren Rogers, partner and head of ventures at Downing Ventures. “We have the highest confidence that when their optical I/O technology is applied to computing, the industry can accelerate even faster than Moore’s Law and redefine the boundaries of computing.”
“We’ve been an investor in Ayar Labs since the beginning and have been looking for opportunities to increase our ownership in the company,” added Madison Hamman, managing director of Blue Sky Capital. “We are very excited about Ayar Labs and believe in their patented technology and execution of a plan that makes it a core building block of future computing systems.”
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