Light Street Capital
Assembly Line
Ayar Labs, with Investments from AMD, Intel Capital, and NVIDIA, Secures $155 Million to Address Urgent Need for Scalable, Cost-Effective AI Infrastructure
Ayar Labs, the leader in optical interconnect solutions for large-scale AI workloads, announced it has secured $155 million in financing led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital to break down the AI bottleneck of data movement with its optical I/O technology. This brings the company’s total funding to $370 million and raises the company’s valuation to above $1 billion. The strength of the round and caliber of investors, including participation from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and NVIDIA, marks another key milestone as Ayar Labs prepares its optical solution for high volume manufacturing strategically aligned to customer roadmaps. Other new strategic and financial investors participating in the round include 3M Ventures and Autopilot. They join existing investors such as Applied Ventures LLC, Axial Partners, Boardman Bay Capital Management, GlobalFoundries, IAG Capital Partners, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Playground Global, and VentureTech Alliance.
Ayar Labs has developed the industry’s first in-package optical I/O solution to replace electrical I/O that is standards-based, commercial-ready, and optimized for AI training and inference. Optical I/O allows customers to maximize the compute efficiency and performance of their AI infrastructure, while reducing costs and power consumption, to dramatically improve profitability metrics for AI applications.