Apr 26, 2022

Ayar Labs , a Santa Clara, Calif.- based leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, secured $130m in Series C funding. The round was led by Boardman Bay Capital Management with participation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA, joining existing strategic investors Applied Ventures LLC, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures, as well as Agave SPV, Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Tyche Partners, and existing investors such as BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, Playground Global, and TechU Venture Partners. The company intends to use the funds to drive the commercialization of its optical I/O solution, ramping production and securing supply chain partners. Led by Charles Wuischpard, CEO, Ayar Labs leverages a patented approach that uses industry standard cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high density, low power optical based interconnect “chiplets” and lasers to replace traditional electrical-based I/O. Its optical I/O solution eliminates the bottlenecks associated with system bandwidth, power consumption, latency, and reach, improving existing system architectures and enabling newnsolutions for artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC), cloud, telecommunications, aerospace, and remote sensing applications. The company has already signed 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. FinSMEs 26/04/2022