Lumilens Raises $900 Million To Build Optical Chips For AI Data Centers

Lumilens, a company specializing in optical networking chips for artificial intelligence clusters, has secured $900 million in funding. The round of investment valued the two-year-old firm at $5.51 billion and was led by several venture capital firms, including Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures, and Spark Capital.

Notable participants included Qualcomm and more than a dozen additional investors. Lumilens' co-founder and CEO, Ankur Singla, previously led two successful networking startups, Contrail Systems and Volterra, which were sold combined for $676 million.

Historically, data centers relied on copper wires for data transfer between processors. However, AI clusters now demand faster speeds, making copper impractical due to its limits. Lumilens addresses this issue by using fiber-optic cabling, which can transmit more data over longer distances while consuming less power. The company currently focuses on two product families: Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) and Near-Packaged Optics (NPO). CPO integrates directly into GPUs, while NPO is placed on the motherboard next to the GPU.

Singla anticipates that large-scale volume deployment of co-packaged optics will take two to three years. Lumilens has developed a proprietary manufacturing workflow featuring robots and AI software to streamline production. The $900 million investment will be utilized to boost chip development and manufacturing efforts. As AI labs strive to build larger clusters, Lumilens envisions optical networking becoming the foundation of next-generation AI infrastructure.