Foresight Group, a UK-based venture capital, private equity, and infrastructure investment manager, has announced that its portfolio company Ayar Labs has completed a $155 million funding round. With this, the company has attained unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion.
In addition to Foresight Group, a number of high-quality investors, including Light Street Capital, Advent Global Opportunities, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and NVIDIA, also participated in the round. It will use the funding to continue to address the urgent need for scalable, cost-effective AI infrastructure.
Revolutionary optical I/O solution
Founded by Alex Wright-Gladstein, Mark Wade, Vladimir Stojanovic, Chen Sun, Milos Popovic, and Rajeev Ram in 2015 in California. It was spun out of MIT to increase speed and reduce energy consumption in computing, starting with data centres.
The company has developed chips that move data around with light but compute electronically. The unique design integrates speedy, efficient optical communications with components that transmit data using light waves into traditional computer chips, replacing less efficient copper wires. According to the company, these chips can reduce energy usage by about 95% in chip-to-chip communications and increase bandwidth tenfold over their copper-based counterparts.
Recognising that the complexity and size of AI models are increasing at a rate that traditional interconnect technology cannot handle, the company has developed the industry’s first optical I/O solution that enables customers to maximise the compute efficiency and performance of growing AI infrastructure. Ayar Labs’ first in-package optical I/O solution replaces electrical I/O that is standards-based, commercial-ready and optimised for AI training and inference.
Redefines boundaries of computing
Its patented approach uses industry-standard cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop the optical I/O TeraPHY chips and SuperNova Light Supply multi-wavelength lasers to replace traditional electrical-based I/O. These smart optical I/O chips are touted to enable System-on-a-chip (SOC) companies and system integrators to focus on their core function integration and process scaling while offloading the I/O tasks to low-power, high-throughput and reach optical I/Os, enabling logically connected but physically disaggregated systems.
Mark Wade, CEO of Ayar Labs said: “We are delighted to close the round, and we’d like to express our thanks to Foresight Ventures and their international team including Richard Lewis (London) and Joe Raffa (Silicon Valley) for their ongoing support since their original investment in 2020.”
Richard Lewis, Managing Director of Foresight Ventures added: “Foresight Ventures would like to congratulate Mark Wade and the team for their exceptional work in closing this funding round and we look forward to supporting the company in the coming years.”
The post Unicorn alert: Ayar Labs’ optical I/O tech lands $155M funding at $1B valuation appeared first on Tech Funding News.